"Thoughts" and The concept of God

Discuss philosophical questions regarding theism (and atheism), and discuss religion as it relates to philosophy. This includes any philosophical discussions that happen to be about god, gods, or a 'higher power' or the belief of them. This also generally includes philosophical topics about organized or ritualistic mysticism or about organized, common or ritualistic beliefs in the existence of supernatural phenomenon.
Jklint
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Re: "Thoughts" and The concept of God

Post by Jklint »

Fdesilva wrote: January 15th, 2019, 12:40 am
Jklint wrote: January 14th, 2019, 9:53 pm Wisdom: The set of all thoughts will contain the perfect answer to every possible question

Not true since questions can still be extraneous to which no thought ever thought corresponds.


Infinitude: The set of all thoughts will have an infinite amount of thoughts
Also not true. Thoughts require an agent. If these are limited than so are its thoughts...severely so.

Sovereignty: There can be no thought that is not an element of the set of all thoughts
One can always insert another thought as if it were an object within a known set.

Omniscience: The set of all thoughts is all knowing as it contains all thoughts.
That's only true if each thought in the entire set is true. If so, then that omniscience equates to god. Since it remains unknown whether god is a true entity it yields the conclusion that omniscience is a non-sequitur since to be true there cannot be one element in it that's false or unknown.


I am not asking you if the set of all thoughts exist or not but rather if the above statements about it is true.

Are your responses above made on the assumption that the set of all thoughts is all the thoughts that have been in the mind of some person /animal to date?
If so that is not what I mean. The set of all thoughts is the set that includes not just what has happened or will happen in the future but every conceivable thought.
...and that's how I interpreted it when I stated omniscience equates to god! If your purpose is to bring forth an argument of every conceivable thought as pure abstraction without a conceiver then what precisely is the intent of your argument?
Belindi
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Re: "Thoughts" and The concept of God

Post by Belindi »

Jklint wrote: January 15th, 2019, 5:10 am
Fdesilva wrote: January 15th, 2019, 12:40 am


Are your responses above made on the assumption that the set of all thoughts is all the thoughts that have been in the mind of some person /animal to date?
If so that is not what I mean. The set of all thoughts is the set that includes not just what has happened or will happen in the future but every conceivable thought.
...and that's how I interpreted it when I stated omniscience equates to god! If your purpose is to bring forth an argument of every conceivable thought as pure abstraction without a conceiver then what precisely is the intent of your argument?
Fdesilva states that omniscience equates to God , and Jklint states (unless I'm mistaken) that omniscience is the set of every conceivable thought.

Fdesilva and Jklint are both right. Then it follows that God equates to possibility. If God equates to possibility then God is that which forbids the impossible. If God is that which forbids the impossible , and what we call evil is not impossible,then God permits what we call evil.
Alias
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Re: "Thoughts" and The concept of God

Post by Alias »

Fdesilva wrote: January 15th, 2019, 2:23 am Electrical impulses as in nerve impulses will require the movement of ions.
The molecules that are transferred from one cell to another, or through membranes, are neurotransmitters and nutrients, not brain substance, which they become only if they are incorporated in the tissue as building blocks. The brain doesn't get rearranged for every though, whether I'm cooking or sleeping or typing.
https://qbi.uq.edu.au/brain/brain-physi ... ansmitters

One more time: What is the function of your god concept? What is it for?
Belindi
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Re: "Thoughts" and The concept of God

Post by Belindi »

Alias asked Fdesilva:
One more time: What is the function of your god concept? What is it for?
Is it for itself?

Is it for Fdesilva?

Is it for existence itself?

Is it for natura naturata which includes me, Fdesilva, Alias and all?

What is a work of art for?
Alias
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Re: "Thoughts" and The concept of God

Post by Alias »

Belindi wrote: January 15th, 2019, 12:21 pm Alias asked Fdesilva:
One more time: What is the function of your god concept? What is it for?
Is it for itself?
Then why go to all this trouble to prove it to me?
Is it for Fdesilva?
That was my question: What does this concept do for Fdesilva?
Is it for existence itself?
Existence itself was doing fine before anybody translated it into mathematics and metaphysics.
Is it for natura naturata which includes me, Fdesilva, Alias and all?
After "existenec itself", isn't this redundant?
What is a work of art for?
Each particular work of art is created in response to a particular human desire and serves a particular purpose.
But you are asking rhetorical questions - ? - rather than responding to my authentic question.
Is it your contention that this mathematical-thought-set-deity is Fdesilva's art project?
If so, that's the most sense I've seen in this thread.
Fdesilva
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Re: "Thoughts" and The concept of God

Post by Fdesilva »

Jklint wrote: January 15th, 2019, 5:10 am ...and that's how I interpreted it when I stated omniscience equates to god! If your purpose is to bring forth an argument of every conceivable thought as pure abstraction without a conceiver then what precisely is the intent of your argument?
Maybe conceivable might have been the wrong word to use. What I have in mind for the set of all thoughts, I will explain by a subset of it.
Consider the set on intergers [1,2,3,...]
Now I can concieve/infer that this set goes to infinity (never ends)
So once I define it as such it will conatin every possible interger. So for example
Sovereignty: There can be no thought that is not an element of the set of all thoughts
One can always insert another thought as if it were an object within a known set.
When you say can insert another thought,...
what do you mean? With the number set you cannot find a number that is not already in it. Would not the same apply to the set of all thoughts?
Fdesilva
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Re: "Thoughts" and The concept of God

Post by Fdesilva »

Belindi wrote: January 15th, 2019, 7:58 am Fdesilva and Jklint are both right. Then it follows that God equates to possibility. If God equates to possibility then God is that which forbids the impossible. If God is that which forbids the impossible , and what we call evil is not impossible,then God permits what we call evil.
Yes I totally agree with God permits what we call evil. However we can recognise evil/good as such only becouse as thoughts are available in the set of all thoughts (God) to make that distinction
Fdesilva
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Re: "Thoughts" and The concept of God

Post by Fdesilva »

Alias wrote: January 15th, 2019, 11:47 am
Fdesilva wrote: January 15th, 2019, 2:23 am Electrical impulses as in nerve impulses will require the movement of ions.
The molecules that are transferred from one cell to another, or through membranes, are neurotransmitters and nutrients, not brain substance, which they become only if they are incorporated in the tissue as building blocks. The brain doesn't get rearranged for every though, whether I'm cooking or sleeping or typing.
https://qbi.uq.edu.au/brain/brain-physi ... ansmitters
So if I am understanding you right you are defining brain substance as strictly limited to the brain cells. The blood vessels the fluid outside the cells etc are not brain substance in you definition. Is that the case?
Alias wrote: January 15th, 2019, 11:47 am One more time: What is the function of your god concept? What is it for?
Are you getting tired of answering my question. If that the case my apologies. The reason I am asking these quetions is becouse when I reasoned starting from your perspective of the brain that is everything is made of atoms molecules and nothing else I come to the conclussion that God exist more easily than if I were to reason on the premise there is both a physical and a non physical things. So I want to see if there is a flaw in my reasoning as if there is you will not agree.
Belindi
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Re: "Thoughts" and The concept of God

Post by Belindi »

Fdesilva wrote:

Yes I totally agree with God permits what we call evil. However we can recognise evil/good as such only becouse as thoughts are available in the set of all thoughts (God) to make that distinction
I don't know the philosophy of mathematics.

Existence does include all thoughts and all thinking. Men can know only that truth status which men themselves have allotted to thoughts. Some thoughts are thoughts that don't pertain to objectively real things which have temporal and spatial existence i.e.they cannot be measured. The Form of the Good is one such thought;the Good cannot be measured. Another thing we can say about the Good is that it's detectable only as the lived experience of a man.That lived experience may be reported as current news, painted in a work of art, acted in a play, said or written as a poem, or told as religious myth.

The popular concept of God is a way of explaining the Good. Myth is an idiom like a poem is an idiom.
Alias
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Re: "Thoughts" and The concept of God

Post by Alias »

Fdesilva wrote: January 15th, 2019, 3:53 pm So if I am understanding you right you are defining brain substance as strictly limited to the brain cells. The blood vessels the fluid outside the cells etc are not brain substance in you definition. Is that the case?
No: all the tissues are substance and none of them are reconfigured by a thought. Thoughts have no permanence. New synapses are formed by making connections for learned procedures. Each thought is nowhere to be found.
Are you getting tired of answering my question.
I'm not clear on their relevance.
The reason I am asking these quetions is becouse when I reasoned starting from your perspective of the brain that is everything is made of atoms molecules and nothing else I come to the conclussion that God exist more easily than if I were to reason on the premise there is both a physical and a non physical things. So I want to see if there is a flaw in my reasoning as if there is you will not agree.
The problem there is with "things". There is structure - a thing, made of matter, takes up space, can be touched, etc. Then there is function - or process. This may be a physical event that can be witnessed and recorded, but is not a material thing.

This gets us no closer to the god concept. Whether its existence is easy of difficult doesn't explain why it's needed at all.
Belindi
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Re: "Thoughts" and The concept of God

Post by Belindi »

Alias wrote:
This gets us no closer to the god concept. Whether its existence is easy of difficult doesn't explain why it's needed at all.
The God concept is needed because of the old question " How should I live my life?"
Alias
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Re: "Thoughts" and The concept of God

Post by Alias »

Belindi wrote: January 15th, 2019, 4:35 pm The God concept is needed because of the old question " How should I live my life?"
That question hasn't been addressed here.
That's why I keep asking Fdesilva what the god is supposed to do for hem.
All we have is a theory that the totality of possible thoughts add up to a set that proves the existence of a mathematical idea of god.
Not what that god is like, where it lives, how it relates to people, what it wants or how it affects the price of hardwood lumber.
Alias
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Re: "Thoughts" and The concept of God

Post by Alias »

Belindi wrote: January 15th, 2019, 4:35 pm The God concept is needed because of the old question " How should I live my life?"
Anyway, why do you need a god for that?
Here you go:
Try to be happy while making as few as possible of your fellow living things unhappy.
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phenomenal_graffiti
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Re: "Thoughts" and The concept of God

Post by phenomenal_graffiti »

Anyway, why do you need a god for that?
Here you go:
Try to be happy while making as few as possible of your fellow living things unhappy.
For those who believe in God your solution, while practical and positive, feels incomplete. There is a strong, pervasive sense that atheism is incorrect.
We are currently living within the mind of Jesus Christ as he is currently being crucified. One may think there is no God, or if one believes in God, one thinks one lives outside the mind of Christ in a post-crucifixion present.

In other news...
Alias
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Re: "Thoughts" and The concept of God

Post by Alias »

phenomenal_graffiti wrote: January 15th, 2019, 11:13 pm For those who believe in God
there is no need to prove the existence of god.
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