Belz...
Fiend God
A better of way of saying what I was trying to convey.
A better of way of saying what I was trying to convey.
asydhouse
Master Poster
Navigator, I'm quite annoyed with you for quoting my post and then altering the numbering system within it, but not making that clear. The numbers in my post were there to correlate with your own numbers in the post to which I was replying. Each of my numbered sections were replying to the sections of your post with those numbers. (Only after your subsequent post drew my attention to the alteration you had made in my numbers did I notice that you had two consecutive sections of your post both numbered with the number "5", which in itself can be a source of confusion with subsequent posting quoting…sheesh!).
So I'm abandoning your unreliable method of numbering points. The convention is to hit the "quote" tab at the bottom of the window containing the post to which you want to reply, and then copy and paste the "end quote" code into the body of the quoted post in order to break it up into the sections you need, and then put your replies to those points in between the quoted sections. (You also have to copy and paste the "start quote" code into the correct places to start each section you are quoting.)
If we replace "god" with the algebraic "X", my statement becomes "X does not exist". This, as I have explained more than once, and which you insist on refusing to acknowledge, is the null hypothesis, which is the scientific position to take (because it is falsifiable simply by showing that X does exist); the contrary statement "X exists" is not a scientific statement, because it is unfalsifiable, because it is impossible to "prove" a negative; in other words, since you can never show that X does not exist (you would have to be able to scan every part of the universe at once in order to do that) the statement "X exists" is unfalsifiable. This is why we have been saying that science does not make absolute statements, contrary to your assertion that we have.
The scientific thing to do is to posit a statement that can be falsified. The statement under discussion is "X does not exist", which can be falsified by showing that X does indeed exist. In the case "X" stands for "my hand", that position is trivially falsified by the observation that I am using my hand to type this statement. In the case that "X" stands for "God", as you point out, we have to put more effort into defining the characteristics of what we refer to as "God".
But the mere fact that work needs to be done to make that definition does not in itself in any way invalidate the scientific correctness of making the statement "X does not exist". It is your job to define X.
I submit that the common definitions that most people are referring to when they supply "X" with "God" are incompatible with all the evidence. That is because they all have some interaction with the physical universe, which is the province of science, and the claims that are made with regard to the properties God should display have not been shown to either occur or to be possible within the framework of the forces etc we have found. Much like homeopathy.
You have tried to claim that you want to allow god to be an idea. Ideas can only exist if supported by physical media: words in a book, brain states etc. When this planet ceases to exist in 2 billion years from now when the sun has swollen to within spitting distance of our orbital space, the ideas we have entertained will cease to exist. Perhaps you want to posit that "god as an idea" is supported by the universe as a whole. Perhaps you are trying to say that the universe is like a vast brain which generate the "idea" of god. Perhaps that is so, I make no judgement of that concept. (You see, it is possible for me to adopt your conclusive "don't know" position. Grant me the respect of considering my next statement, which you have already ignored in the last post):
If "god" is a nonphysical idea, a concept generated by the universal process of being in the same way that a mind is generated by the process of the brain, then the moment that idea affects the body of the universe in any way, it becomes entangled in the physicality of the universe, and becomes detectable. In other words, it ceases to be a pure idea, and becomes a falsifiable physical phenomenon. I perceive that you and Punnnsh have got this causality back to front, since you both have made statements to the effect that "consciousness" is some sort of unphysical substance or condition which creates the brain, or some such unsupportable view. I put it to you that if it is a substance, it is not a pure idea. Conversely, if it is a pure idea, it cannot be a substance of any kind in itself. It's only substantiality has to be in its dependance on a substance to support it, i.e. to generate it's existence.
You have made it extremely difficult for me to refer back to the statement to which this is a reply. I have managed to ascertain that you are discounting the logic of my argument that the consciousness is dependant on the brain. Why you dismiss the logic of the evidence we have is shown by your next statement: (I have already addressed this peculiarly New Agey arse-backwards way of viewing things at the end of my first comment above):
We can and do know that there is no continuation of consciousness after death in this vicinity. Further we can say that there is no way for consciousness to exist without reference to the physical universe. Metaphysics don't come into it.
Your first statement I hilite above is a bald statement with no supporting evidence. It is totally an assertion, and an absolute assertion at that. By comparison, the assertion I made that there is no consciousness without a physical medium to generate it is an observation of what is. Frankly, you have a cheek to accuse my statement of being a matter of faith, and then to turn around and make an unsupported assertion like this!
Your definition of speculation is to neuter the very concept of speculation: to speculate that it might or might not be is to speculate nothing at all. It's a useless position. Nothing can proceed from it.
This is just idle waffle. You are not thinking about what you are saying, which I find ironic in a dialogue like this. All of your first two paragraphs are muddling the concepts of nonphysical and physical existence: you say "should there be an afterlife" then waffle waffle… any and all idle "spiritualist" depictions of some kind of "afterlife" are irrelevant to the fundamental question we are addressing of the nature of the medium through which this supposed "afterlife" would exist. You are still ignoring the issue that if it's dependant on the physical world, even if only to the extent that it can interact with the physical, then it is detectable by us. Likewise, if it is nonphysical, it cannot interact. It may as well not exist. Because it doesn't in any meaningful way "exist" in the physical world, by your own definition!
The internet, in case you don't realise, is dependant on a physical network of cables and computers and servers, all interconnected by physical forces such as electricity and magnetism, and also in fact the strong and weak nuclear forces, and in fact also gravity. No other forces are required, and no others are found.
It is incumbent on you to provide the characteristics of X, so that the scientific statement "X does not exist" can proceed to playing out through using the further tools of science, prediction and testing, repeated with refinements as aspects of X are addressed. Until you define the properties of X, you have not earned the right to dismiss the algebra of my scientific statement.
Okay I can see that you are attempting to apply my own reasoning to the statement "unicorns do not exist", and I think I see where you are misunderstanding the whole impetus of my argument: the confusion lies in your repeated insistence that I am making an absolute statement when I say that it is the scientific position to say that "God does not exist".
Again, I am not making an absolute statement. I am positing a statement, which is open to falsifying: The statement could be more accurately stated as "Given everything we have so far discovered (and given the formulations of frameworks of thought we have created from what we have so far found out) it is very unlikely that such a phenomenon as 'God' (defined as this set of characteristics drawn from the arbiters of godness, i.e. the religions of the world or individuals who purport to speak for the entity/ies referred to as 'God') can exist in tandem with the actual physical universe we appear to inhabit. The more we have discovered, the less and less likely does the existence of 'God' become, so that at this point we can say, as a provisional position until contrary evidence comes to light, 'God does not exist'".
You are taking this position and blowing it up into a statement which is on the face of it nonsensical: It is manifestly unreal to claim that extraterrestrials do not exist until we discover them. I am not even claiming that God doesn't exist until we discover it.
It is trivially true to say that if we discover that something exists, it must have existed before we came across it. That is how science is a never finished project, and has no problem humbly admitting that a previous position was wrong as soon as new data requires adjustment to theory. In science, data trumps theory every time (as long as the data is sound, of course, something which is vital to correct theory, and why we didn't immediately throw out relativity when a mistake due to faulty components in the circuit returned a measurement of particles traveling faster than the speed of light a couple of years ago… at CERN I think? Very careful checking and testing eventually revealed the fault, and lo and behold, the new data reconfirmed the theory of relativity… which is still provisionally correct until actual sound data overthrows it, if ever, at some point in the future… Get it?)
As is becoming abundantly clear, you are a mystic. So "consciousness is God" eh? This says to me that God is an ephemeral, flimsy diaphanous entity which flickers into and out of existence at the whim of idle neurones.
But that is not what you mean, is it? You want us to think of "consciousness" as some prior non substantial "substance" which gives rise to the universe, even though it does not interact with it. And yet, everything we know about consciousness is the exact opposite of this picture you present.
It's a common New Age conceit (which is, as I defined in my post, a confection of thought, an idea, a metaphorical toy of the mind… I defined it, but you did not accept or take in my definition, just as you do not accept or take in my logic as to the necessity for an idea to be amenable to physical detection as soon as it interacts with the physical): from personal experience, I can say that when one is riding high or deep in a good clean acid trip, the very substance of all the world around one can be redolent of some "suchness" that makes one feel as if everything is indeed a manifestation of pure consciousness. It is a delicious state to be in, and it is tremendously rewarding to feel that primacy, that all is a manifestation of the substance of mind. Naive, scientifically illiterate hippies (of which I was one for the first 3 to 4 decades of my life… and for what it's worth, I'm still a hippie, but now scientifically literate!
) take this sort of experience as a literal actuality. Personally, I revel in such experiences, and yet I at no time have to surrender my scientific understanding of what is actually going on.
The argument is only endless and looping because of your refusal to rigorously define your concepts and follow the logic to its sound conclusion!
You are throwing your hands up and saying "we can never know" and claiming that the fault lies with science, and not with your own fuzzy thinking and refusal to define what you mean.
As an example of my last claim about your thinking: why did you ignore the explanation of what I meant by the use of the word "conceit" in the post to which you were replying? If you can misrepresent something I said so clearly in my post, what else might you being misrepresenting in your own mind about what I've been saying? Your implication that I meant it as a harsh and judgemental label, because you are using the wrong definition of the word, which I attempted expressly to show you was not the case by actually putting the definition immediately after my first use of the word, makes me distrust your honesty.
Quoting my post and altering the numbers in it without any notice of that meddling is another source causing me to distrust your honesty.
I am willing to allow that you may have been tired, distracted, and simply making a mistake, but even in that case it makes me cautious. You might want to be honest, and are just incompetent. Either way, it erodes my trust in you as a companion in dialogue.
Much more egregious is your refusal to acknowledge the logic of my distinction between a pure idea and the materiality of an idea's intersection with the physical universe. Your insistence that consciousness can exist independently of the physical, and yet interact with the physical without entering into physicality, is either an extremely sophisticated concept (or conceit) which calls upon very subtle intelligence of mathematical reasoning or higher level systems of dynamics of which I can only dimly glimpse possibilities (something of which I am amenable to granting, as it happens… provisional possibility that we really may not know something of an emergent higher level of conceptual dynamics which give rise to the apparent primacy of mathematics, for instance… I am frankly not equipped with the tools, knowledge, nor intelligence to go there), your conceit of nonphysical consciousness is either a calling to that speculation (which really would be a truly speculative position, unlike your "maybe,maybe not", which is an impoverished variety of "speculation")… or it is a failure to pay attention to the reasoning I presented in my discussions of the intersection of the non-physical "idea" with the physical reality.
As it happens, I'm quite keen on the conceit of "ideational objects" as works of art. I have been creating a free ebook from my Final Project to conclude a MA in Fine Art which I completed last year, all about a conceptual artwork I have created, involving special relativity. (and poetry and psychedelic art and video).
I have been championing the idea of art as nonmaterial experience instead of physical residue in art objects. You can check out this thread from last year where I explicated my thoughts quite extensively (my first post in the thread is number 19): http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=248613
Or you might like to peruse my website here: http://www.asydhouse.co.uk/asydhouse.co.uk/a_Syd_house.html
If you have an iPad or a current OS iMac, you can download my book for free from the iBook Store here: https://itunes.apple.com/book/id570713412?mt=11
I would love to get some feed back from anyone here on JREF!
Let me conclude by stating this: For all my advocacy of art works as conceptual objects, that is art as an experience in the mind of the user of art, and for all my "derision" of art objects as mere fetish objects, I still recognise that the ideational objects I speak of are nevertheless dependant on the physical generator of the human brain. Even the "shared space" of memes and conceptual networking are dependant on the physical media through which they are sustained.
Thank you. Syd
So I'm abandoning your unreliable method of numbering points. The convention is to hit the "quote" tab at the bottom of the window containing the post to which you want to reply, and then copy and paste the "end quote" code into the body of the quoted post in order to break it up into the sections you need, and then put your replies to those points in between the quoted sections. (You also have to copy and paste the "start quote" code into the correct places to start each section you are quoting.)
If we replace "god" with the algebraic "X", my statement becomes "X does not exist". This, as I have explained more than once, and which you insist on refusing to acknowledge, is the null hypothesis, which is the scientific position to take (because it is falsifiable simply by showing that X does exist); the contrary statement "X exists" is not a scientific statement, because it is unfalsifiable, because it is impossible to "prove" a negative; in other words, since you can never show that X does not exist (you would have to be able to scan every part of the universe at once in order to do that) the statement "X exists" is unfalsifiable. This is why we have been saying that science does not make absolute statements, contrary to your assertion that we have.
The scientific thing to do is to posit a statement that can be falsified. The statement under discussion is "X does not exist", which can be falsified by showing that X does indeed exist. In the case "X" stands for "my hand", that position is trivially falsified by the observation that I am using my hand to type this statement. In the case that "X" stands for "God", as you point out, we have to put more effort into defining the characteristics of what we refer to as "God".
But the mere fact that work needs to be done to make that definition does not in itself in any way invalidate the scientific correctness of making the statement "X does not exist". It is your job to define X.
I submit that the common definitions that most people are referring to when they supply "X" with "God" are incompatible with all the evidence. That is because they all have some interaction with the physical universe, which is the province of science, and the claims that are made with regard to the properties God should display have not been shown to either occur or to be possible within the framework of the forces etc we have found. Much like homeopathy.
You have tried to claim that you want to allow god to be an idea. Ideas can only exist if supported by physical media: words in a book, brain states etc. When this planet ceases to exist in 2 billion years from now when the sun has swollen to within spitting distance of our orbital space, the ideas we have entertained will cease to exist. Perhaps you want to posit that "god as an idea" is supported by the universe as a whole. Perhaps you are trying to say that the universe is like a vast brain which generate the "idea" of god. Perhaps that is so, I make no judgement of that concept. (You see, it is possible for me to adopt your conclusive "don't know" position. Grant me the respect of considering my next statement, which you have already ignored in the last post):
If "god" is a nonphysical idea, a concept generated by the universal process of being in the same way that a mind is generated by the process of the brain, then the moment that idea affects the body of the universe in any way, it becomes entangled in the physicality of the universe, and becomes detectable. In other words, it ceases to be a pure idea, and becomes a falsifiable physical phenomenon. I perceive that you and Punnnsh have got this causality back to front, since you both have made statements to the effect that "consciousness" is some sort of unphysical substance or condition which creates the brain, or some such unsupportable view. I put it to you that if it is a substance, it is not a pure idea. Conversely, if it is a pure idea, it cannot be a substance of any kind in itself. It's only substantiality has to be in its dependance on a substance to support it, i.e. to generate it's existence.
You have made it extremely difficult for me to refer back to the statement to which this is a reply. I have managed to ascertain that you are discounting the logic of my argument that the consciousness is dependant on the brain. Why you dismiss the logic of the evidence we have is shown by your next statement: (I have already addressed this peculiarly New Agey arse-backwards way of viewing things at the end of my first comment above):
We can and do know that there is no continuation of consciousness after death in this vicinity. Further we can say that there is no way for consciousness to exist without reference to the physical universe. Metaphysics don't come into it.
Your first statement I hilite above is a bald statement with no supporting evidence. It is totally an assertion, and an absolute assertion at that. By comparison, the assertion I made that there is no consciousness without a physical medium to generate it is an observation of what is. Frankly, you have a cheek to accuse my statement of being a matter of faith, and then to turn around and make an unsupported assertion like this!
Your definition of speculation is to neuter the very concept of speculation: to speculate that it might or might not be is to speculate nothing at all. It's a useless position. Nothing can proceed from it.
This is just idle waffle. You are not thinking about what you are saying, which I find ironic in a dialogue like this. All of your first two paragraphs are muddling the concepts of nonphysical and physical existence: you say "should there be an afterlife" then waffle waffle… any and all idle "spiritualist" depictions of some kind of "afterlife" are irrelevant to the fundamental question we are addressing of the nature of the medium through which this supposed "afterlife" would exist. You are still ignoring the issue that if it's dependant on the physical world, even if only to the extent that it can interact with the physical, then it is detectable by us. Likewise, if it is nonphysical, it cannot interact. It may as well not exist. Because it doesn't in any meaningful way "exist" in the physical world, by your own definition!
The internet, in case you don't realise, is dependant on a physical network of cables and computers and servers, all interconnected by physical forces such as electricity and magnetism, and also in fact the strong and weak nuclear forces, and in fact also gravity. No other forces are required, and no others are found.
It is incumbent on you to provide the characteristics of X, so that the scientific statement "X does not exist" can proceed to playing out through using the further tools of science, prediction and testing, repeated with refinements as aspects of X are addressed. Until you define the properties of X, you have not earned the right to dismiss the algebra of my scientific statement.
Okay I can see that you are attempting to apply my own reasoning to the statement "unicorns do not exist", and I think I see where you are misunderstanding the whole impetus of my argument: the confusion lies in your repeated insistence that I am making an absolute statement when I say that it is the scientific position to say that "God does not exist".
Again, I am not making an absolute statement. I am positing a statement, which is open to falsifying: The statement could be more accurately stated as "Given everything we have so far discovered (and given the formulations of frameworks of thought we have created from what we have so far found out) it is very unlikely that such a phenomenon as 'God' (defined as this set of characteristics drawn from the arbiters of godness, i.e. the religions of the world or individuals who purport to speak for the entity/ies referred to as 'God') can exist in tandem with the actual physical universe we appear to inhabit. The more we have discovered, the less and less likely does the existence of 'God' become, so that at this point we can say, as a provisional position until contrary evidence comes to light, 'God does not exist'".
You are taking this position and blowing it up into a statement which is on the face of it nonsensical: It is manifestly unreal to claim that extraterrestrials do not exist until we discover them. I am not even claiming that God doesn't exist until we discover it.
It is trivially true to say that if we discover that something exists, it must have existed before we came across it. That is how science is a never finished project, and has no problem humbly admitting that a previous position was wrong as soon as new data requires adjustment to theory. In science, data trumps theory every time (as long as the data is sound, of course, something which is vital to correct theory, and why we didn't immediately throw out relativity when a mistake due to faulty components in the circuit returned a measurement of particles traveling faster than the speed of light a couple of years ago… at CERN I think? Very careful checking and testing eventually revealed the fault, and lo and behold, the new data reconfirmed the theory of relativity… which is still provisionally correct until actual sound data overthrows it, if ever, at some point in the future… Get it?)
As is becoming abundantly clear, you are a mystic. So "consciousness is God" eh? This says to me that God is an ephemeral, flimsy diaphanous entity which flickers into and out of existence at the whim of idle neurones.
But that is not what you mean, is it? You want us to think of "consciousness" as some prior non substantial "substance" which gives rise to the universe, even though it does not interact with it. And yet, everything we know about consciousness is the exact opposite of this picture you present.
It's a common New Age conceit (which is, as I defined in my post, a confection of thought, an idea, a metaphorical toy of the mind… I defined it, but you did not accept or take in my definition, just as you do not accept or take in my logic as to the necessity for an idea to be amenable to physical detection as soon as it interacts with the physical): from personal experience, I can say that when one is riding high or deep in a good clean acid trip, the very substance of all the world around one can be redolent of some "suchness" that makes one feel as if everything is indeed a manifestation of pure consciousness. It is a delicious state to be in, and it is tremendously rewarding to feel that primacy, that all is a manifestation of the substance of mind. Naive, scientifically illiterate hippies (of which I was one for the first 3 to 4 decades of my life… and for what it's worth, I'm still a hippie, but now scientifically literate!
) take this sort of experience as a literal actuality. Personally, I revel in such experiences, and yet I at no time have to surrender my scientific understanding of what is actually going on.The argument is only endless and looping because of your refusal to rigorously define your concepts and follow the logic to its sound conclusion!
You are throwing your hands up and saying "we can never know" and claiming that the fault lies with science, and not with your own fuzzy thinking and refusal to define what you mean.
As an example of my last claim about your thinking: why did you ignore the explanation of what I meant by the use of the word "conceit" in the post to which you were replying? If you can misrepresent something I said so clearly in my post, what else might you being misrepresenting in your own mind about what I've been saying? Your implication that I meant it as a harsh and judgemental label, because you are using the wrong definition of the word, which I attempted expressly to show you was not the case by actually putting the definition immediately after my first use of the word, makes me distrust your honesty.
Quoting my post and altering the numbers in it without any notice of that meddling is another source causing me to distrust your honesty.
I am willing to allow that you may have been tired, distracted, and simply making a mistake, but even in that case it makes me cautious. You might want to be honest, and are just incompetent. Either way, it erodes my trust in you as a companion in dialogue.
Much more egregious is your refusal to acknowledge the logic of my distinction between a pure idea and the materiality of an idea's intersection with the physical universe. Your insistence that consciousness can exist independently of the physical, and yet interact with the physical without entering into physicality, is either an extremely sophisticated concept (or conceit) which calls upon very subtle intelligence of mathematical reasoning or higher level systems of dynamics of which I can only dimly glimpse possibilities (something of which I am amenable to granting, as it happens… provisional possibility that we really may not know something of an emergent higher level of conceptual dynamics which give rise to the apparent primacy of mathematics, for instance… I am frankly not equipped with the tools, knowledge, nor intelligence to go there), your conceit of nonphysical consciousness is either a calling to that speculation (which really would be a truly speculative position, unlike your "maybe,maybe not", which is an impoverished variety of "speculation")… or it is a failure to pay attention to the reasoning I presented in my discussions of the intersection of the non-physical "idea" with the physical reality.
As it happens, I'm quite keen on the conceit of "ideational objects" as works of art. I have been creating a free ebook from my Final Project to conclude a MA in Fine Art which I completed last year, all about a conceptual artwork I have created, involving special relativity. (and poetry and psychedelic art and video).
I have been championing the idea of art as nonmaterial experience instead of physical residue in art objects. You can check out this thread from last year where I explicated my thoughts quite extensively (my first post in the thread is number 19): http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=248613
Or you might like to peruse my website here: http://www.asydhouse.co.uk/asydhouse.co.uk/a_Syd_house.html
If you have an iPad or a current OS iMac, you can download my book for free from the iBook Store here: https://itunes.apple.com/book/id570713412?mt=11
I would love to get some feed back from anyone here on JREF!
Let me conclude by stating this: For all my advocacy of art works as conceptual objects, that is art as an experience in the mind of the user of art, and for all my "derision" of art objects as mere fetish objects, I still recognise that the ideational objects I speak of are nevertheless dependant on the physical generator of the human brain. Even the "shared space" of memes and conceptual networking are dependant on the physical media through which they are sustained.
Thank you. Syd
tsig
a carbon based life-form
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"Blessed are the peacemakers" is often an epitaph.
Navigator
Philosopher
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Yes that is something of the nature of the language which allows for words to be interchangeable - like the words 'belief' and 'know'.
Which is why it is necessary to have to explain the context of the word being used, not that it matters to some folk who prefer the convenience of interchangeability.
So anyway, in reality - "You'd still have the underlying, dimensionless, matterless quantum stuff" *= 'something' not 'nothing'.
If we were not able to agree on *this, we are unlikely to agree on anything much.
ETA: Examples of language and its interchangeable uses
Navigator: If something cannot be defined, then it cannot potentially exist
Aridas: You missed a word or two. "If something cannot even potentially be defined" would work far better, even if it would still be somewhat conceptually questionable. As part of learning and the growth of language, we tend to become able to define more and more things. That something simply cannot be defined because because of the limitations of language or understanding at some point in no way would affect whether something could potentially exist.
Navigator: The invisible pile of gold in my backyard which gentlehorse defines might exist, doesn't exist because gold is by nature, not invisible. The definition cancels out its existence.
Aridas: Invisible is frequently used and defined in a somewhat lesser way, namely, "hidden from view," which is far from impossible and not at all contradictory to gold's nature. Thus, the definition actually doesn't cancel out it's existence for the reason you argued.
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Dissolution
Master Poster
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My belief in what is unreasonable, exactly?
Navigator
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The evidence would have to be complete of course. Otherwise (unfortunately) there is opportunity for belief to form and take hold.
Navigator
Philosopher
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I have already covered this.
Navigator
Philosopher
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Yeah sorry about that asydhouse. Numbering works initially but gets confusing and is subject to human error - quoting is way better I agree.
Mostly the errors occurred because there were multiple points I wanted to address within you numbered sections and could have gone with 5, 5a, 5b etc...but it was laziness on my part.
I haven;t read the rest of your post but will do and reply later.
Navigator
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Tell me what it is you believe and I will then see if I can show you.
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Dissolution
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You claimed that my belief was illogical and ridiculous without even knowing what I believe?
bruto
Penultimate Amazing
What is the nature of God? What if I just say the gold in my backyard, like the god there, is supernatural? It's the stuff the streets of Heaven are paved with.
I Am The Scum
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A noun and a verb are interchangeable?
punshhh
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You see no paradox, perhaps you can give me a rational explanation of the origin of what exists?
The paradox is to be found in the inevitability of regression. I have not so far come across an adequate solution to this problem.
I am talking of rational lines of thought, not physical states described by science.
My paradox is that rationality cannot justify what exists not having an origin (every thing has an origin), while the only alternative it can come up with is turtles all the way down (regression). The problem with regression is that regression or turtles continue ad infinitum. Infinity is a mental construct, a construct which is very problematic when one attempts to apply it to existence. Things continuing ad infinitum is an absurdity rather like the absurdity of things having no origin.
So option 1, no origin, the consequence of which is existing eternally
and option 2, regression,the consequence of which is there is an origin, but an origin infinitely distant.
The paradox, existing eternally is equivalent to infinitely distant. Both alternatives fail in infinite regression which is a human construct.
Care to offer an alternative option?
Agreed, I've just read the passage below.
Navigator
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You claimed that my belief was illogical and ridiculous without even knowing what I believe?
Actually (you may have missed it) I claimed all belief was illogical.
Tassman
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Brian-M
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And do you believe this claim?
John Jones
Penultimate Amazing
Actually, it's a very good definition of existence, you just don't like that I was able to provide it so quickly.
John Jones
Penultimate Amazing
Who made that claim? It certainly wasn't me.
Tassman
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Re the bolded: This 700 year old metaphysical argument of Dominican monk St. Thomas Aquinas has been superseded by what science now knows about the universe, e.g. his assumption, which you've adopted, that nothing can extend back into infinity. This is simply an argument from ignorance. An “origin” is not necessary. There are good reasons to think infinity is possible. And there are no empirical reasons to think it impossible. Physics tells us that energy cannot be created, and even despite apparent nothingness actual nothingness appears to be impossible. An apparent vacuum isn't truly empty - it's seething with quantum particles and a ground state of energy, known as Zero-Point energy. And yes, it is probably eternal.
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