Beyond the Duality of Blind Belief and Blind Denial

[PoeticUniverse]

"To restore to science as a whole, for mathematics as well as psychology and sociology, the sense of its origin and veritable destiny as a bridge leading toward God---not by diminishing, but by increasing precision in demonstration, verification and supposition---that would indeed be a task worth accomplishing." Simone Weil

The above can be taken as our challenge to further define and refine the possibility and probability of God according to the following parameters:

0. There is an order to the universe, logically, giving rise to the deep emotion of awe that spurs the quest for supposing and then understanding God.

1. God is timeless/changeless, aka eternal, absolute, fundamental, 'IS' … A God operating in time would be a changing God.

2. God has Mind, and so is a God-Who-is-a-Person, not a God-that-is-not-a-person—such as quantum fields as basic would be. Mind is needed for thinking, intention, planning, and implementation of a universe.

3. God is not a personal God. God's Good Plan operates at the general, universal sense, not at a specific, personal sense. Example: water is good but also necessitates floods and drought; a farmer wishes for rain and the wedding guests across the street hope for sunshine.

4. God's presence is not to be shown directly.

5. The message of our reality in this universe is that we operate linearly in time, aka presentism.

6. The Universe has to be incredibly large.

7. The nature of our universe is of a specific structure with specific initial conditions.

8. Human nature must be imperfect.

9. We can learn and thus enlarge the range of useful decisions in our repertoire, good or bad.

More?

[Sy Borg]

The Bible is like fine art. It appeals to the level of the receiver. As a person matures spiritually, the deeper messages of the Bible appear.

This is exactly the situation with the scientific body of knowledge and other aspects of culture. The Bible is nowhere near as special as its boosters make out. There are a number of religious treatises around the world, and the Bible just happens to be the one adopted by Constantine and, thus, the western world.

The spiritually mature person will appreciate the beauty, intelligence, depth and profundity of science too. The immature will see science as a competitor, irrelevant or an imposition on freedom.

[PoeticUniverse]

More?

10. God is all there is. There is not something else in addition to the God as Absolute.

11. An Absolute—God—cannot be made or go away. It’s permanent.

12. God is an Absolute First Cause. Causeless.

more?

[Nick_A]

More?

10. God is all there is. There is not something else in addition to the God as Absolute.

11. An Absolute—God—cannot be made or go away. It’s permanent.

12. God is an Absolute First Cause. Causeless.

more?

God is the ultimate unified conscious perfection beyond the domains of time and space. The problem is "What is Man?" If God was made in the image of Man, what is man? What is believed and what is denied about Man?

[PoeticUniverse]

The problem is "What is Man?"

In our God Investigation, we'll have to derive that Two is One unfurled, since God is All, all multiplicity stemming from the Unity.

I'll soon put here an exploration of points 0 & 1… after dessert.

[PoeticUniverse]

0. There is a logical order to the universe for those who look, this knowledge giving rise to the deep emotion of awe that spurs the quest for supposing and then understanding God.

So here we begin our search for the Mind who created the Universe, with some poetic fanfare, if you will indulge me.


Lost in the Haystack?

What great needle plays, stitches, winds, and paves
The strands of the quantum fields’ types of waves
To weave the warp, weft, and woof of our ‘verse
Into being’s fabric of living braids?


We the Seekers

In this lost haunt on the Orion arm
Of the galaxy, safe from the core’s harm,
We philosophers meet in this forum,
As sleuth-hounds to unweave the Cosmic yarn.

We search for the Start of the Universe,
The End, the Before, the After, the Kinds,
The Measures, and All That Lies Between:
The Music of the Spheres’ Magnificat.

We’ll follow every single avenue,
Whether it’s brightly lit or a dark alley,
Exploring one-ways, no-ways, and dead-ends,
Until we uncover the Greatest Truth.

Since we all became of this universe,
Should we not ask who we are, whence we came?
Insight clefts night’s skirt with its radiance—
The Theory of Everything will shine through!

We’re already down to what fits in hand:
All is either a relational band
Or an Absolute with a Cosmic plan;
Here we choose the latter to investigate.


Our Charter

To learn the Secrets—what IS and e’er WAS,
One must brave the crypt and ghost of cause.

So into the deep we go, without pause,
To look down, ever down, no self to keep—
Through birth, death, and the shade of sleep,
Through paths unkempt, underswept—

To the deep,
Through the cloudy strife
Of this hazy life,
Through the equations of eternity—
Their non-paternity nor maternity,
Past the realm of the things which seem or are,
Even o’er the steps of the remotest bar.

Down, down,
Where the mind whirls round and round,
As the ear draws forth the sound,
As the eye sees the light,
And of the dark the fright.

Down, down,
Beyond all death, despair, love, and sorrow,
Past yesterday, today, and tomorrow—
The body’s guide but the logic of the ‘know’.

Down through the fog, the not, and the void,
Where light and everything dims; Oh, zoids!

Down,
Where reigns the night, where the air is thin,
Where the sky and stars are not, but within,
Where the glorious have not their throne,
Where there is One presiding, all alone.

Down, down,
To the fathoms of the cryptic;
Where substance slept with arithmetic,

Toward the spark yet nursed by embers,
To the first and last the universe remembers,
To seek the gem that shines—the wealth of mines,
The jewels so treasured by thee and thine.

What truth accelerates life’s momentous gem,
Letting our motto become “Carpe diem”?
Who seized the moment or lost its momentum,
Wearing not the time as its royal diadem?

The World does not pass by—you pass through it live;
Clear your being so the treasure may arrive;
The spirit sparkles of a different light—
The gemstones are of a different mine.

Down, down!
We guide thee, we must carry thee;
We’re illumination beside thee…

Down!
Fear not the proof—
It’s the beauty of the truth …

[PoeticUniverse]

1. God is timeless/changeless, aka eternal, absolute, fundamental, 'IS' … A God operating in time would be a changing God.

Einstein’s Special Relativity Universe is timeless because in his theory ‘time’ is shown to be a variable, and thus time is not absolute, but relative, there being no universal ‘now’.

This Special Relativity Universe contains all its destined and particular events already laid out from its starting point and infinitely onward. This is Eternalism, in which past, present, and future coexist. Aka ‘One’, Block Universe, A Picture of Change. Parmenides’ philosophy accords and thus we are heartened to preceding this direction that matches God.

In Einstein’s General Relativity and the Standard Model of particle physics, the laws that underlie them are time-symmetric—the physics described is the same, regardless of whether ‘time’ increases or decreases. Aka time-reversible laws.

More so, the laws say nothing about the ‘now’ point. In this static universe of space-time, any flow of ‘time’, or passage through it thus must be a mental construct or an illusion.

(“As the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann understood in the 19th century, the second law explains why events are more likely to evolve in one direction rather than another. It accounts for the arrow of time.”)


Bolstering Eternalism by diminishing the alternative of Presentism:

There are damning problems with the scheme of Presentism as a sequence of nows with the past not kept and the future not yet existing, the first problem being its unrelenting besiegement by Einstein’s relativity of simultaneity.

Second, the turning of a ‘now’ into the next ‘now’ sits on the thinnest knife edge imaginable, the previous ‘now’ wholly consumed in the making of the new ‘now’ all over the universe at once in a dynamical updating—the present now exhausting all reality. It’s not that the incredibly short Planck time couldn’t be the processing time, but… I don’t know; what do the readers think?

Third, what is going to exist or was existent, as the presentist must refer to as ‘to be’ or ‘has been’ is indicated as coming or going and is thus inherent in the totality of what is, and so Presentism has no true ‘nonexistence’ of the future and the past—which means that there is no contrast between a real future and an unreal future, for what is real or exists can have no opposite to form a contrast class.

Con to the Timeless: (from Gisin) A Large Speed Bump?

In a predetermined world in which time only seems to unfold, exactly what will happen for all time actually had to be set from the start, with the initial state of every single particle encoded with infinitely many digits of precision. Otherwise there would be a time in the far future when the clockwork universe itself would break down.

But information is physical. Modern research shows that it requires energy and occupies space. Any volume of space is known to have a finite information capacity (with the densest possible information storage happening inside black holes). The universe’s initial conditions would require far too much information crammed into too little space. A real number with infinite digits can’t be physically relevant. The block universe, which implicitly assumes the existence of infinite information, must fall apart.

My attempt to counter it for now: If either the universe has a zero-sum of energy or it has positive or negative energy, the Conservation of Energy principle demands infinite precision of interactions.

My fun but serious video pertaining: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTfbGc3Oka8

[PoeticUniverse]

1. (Timeless) continued…

God knows all our futures and so thus there they are in the Eternalist Block Universe, carved into stone for all time,
A necessary predestination/predetermination by the One who knows All since He created All. Presentism grants no relief here either, for therein one state leads to the next.

Emotionally, we don’t like determinism but its removal/opposite would be that the will either doesn’t do its job of subconscious analysis or is random. Thank God for our consistency of the will. We don’t need more air-headedness than there already seems to be.

The consolation prizes from determinism’s cause and effect are:

1) It can’t be any other way, but this grants consistency; so, peace.

2) Consistency grants continuance. Life is produced, via the necessities of evolution through natural selection, after forming a base for it through particles forming stars that emit the atomic elements, which form molecules, cells, life, and so forth.

3) We experience life’s happenings better, feeling them as novel.

4) We reduce agitation, for whatever will be will be.

5) We gain compassion for those who are stuck, who can’t easily gain knowledge.

6) Knowing a truth provides for learning, and thus wisdom.

What’s the meaning to this play we’re befit,
From dirt to dust within the script that’s writ?
The wise in search have thrown themselves to waste;
Experience alone is the benefit.

To be fair, though, the experiences of living in third world countries may not be considered as a benefit by some, nor those living long ago.

So, ‘free will’ is reduced to indicating that the will is able to operate, which is no great shake, or that one’s actions are not being coerced, whether by another person or by the weather or whatnot, which position is known as compatibilism, but this, too, grants us no real revelation or insight. Besides, the coercion was going to happen, too, as an effect from the causes that it had. The will is just the will—a neural network that votes.

The judicial courts differentiate between ‘responsible’ versus ‘coerced’ (by another or via metal ills), this axis being orthogonal to the main axis of ‘free will’ versus ‘fixed will’ or ‘undetermined versus determined’, which the judges hardly get into, although there are cases in which defendants plead their bad nurture or nature, or, as of late, that addicts need help rather than being incarcerated as criminals.

Defendant: Your honor, the universe made me do it, so please don’t sentence me.

Judge: Yes, true, it did, but we still have to lock you up until the universe doesn’t make you do it anymore, for we have to protect society, plus learning may happen, if you are able.

One last nail in the coffin of Presentism:

From Gustav E. Romero,

I offer a new argument based on the existence of gravitational waves.
The argument goes like this:
P1. There are gravitational waves.
P2. Gravitational waves have non-zero Weyl curvature.
P3. Non-zero Weyl curvature is only possible in 4 or more dimensions. P4. Presentism is incompatible with a 4 dimensional world.
Then, presentism is false.
…
Strings of changes and irreversible processes of physical things are described by asymmetries, intrinsic features, of space-time. Dynamics is the result of comparing different slices of space-time. The ‘present’ is not a moving thing. It is just a concept, a class of events. All this conforms the so-called block universe ontology (e.g. Smart 1963, Balashov 2010). This view was also expressed, rather poetically, by Hermann Weyl (Weyl 1949):

The objective world simply is, it does not happen. Only to the gaze of my consciousness, crawling upward along the life line of my body, does a section of this world come to life as a fleeting image in space which continuously changes in time.

[PoeticUniverse]

2. God has Mind, and so is a God-Who-is-a-Person, not a God-that-is-not-a-person—such as quantum fields as basic would be. Mind is needed for thinking, intention, planning, and implementation of a universe.

An Absolute, God is all at once, as timeless, and so thus as Eternal can’t have a beginning and therefore God couldn’t have any particular/specific design or input coming in to Him in the first place that never was, and so thus God must have the qualities and powers of everything possible, these including Mind and Personhood.

So thus did our own human consciousness and qualia become intrinsic, since we have to be of God since God is all there is. It’s just that we have lesser abilities than the Whole because we have to be of smaller extent than God and also so as to be able to operate in the world. There can be only One Absolute—God, with the dreams within necessarily having to be of less dimension.

We can also take in the world sequentially, in a linear way, to examine details, or view it all at once, in parallel, holistically; so, we too have a kind of multiplicity within unity. This gives us a clue to the nature of the Universe in how it operates since we are the Universe as in God’s image in our multiplicity that can only come from God’s unity.


3. God is not a personal God. God’s Good Plan operates at the general, universal sense, not at a specific, personal sense. Example: water is good but also necessitates floods and drought; a farmer wishes for rain and the wedding party across the street hopes for sunshine.

Self-explanatory as what’s best for all.


4. God cannot appear to us directly.

No one has seen God nor can He ever be seen because He is of a higher dimensionality, yet, we are already in Him.


5. The message of our reality in this universe is that we operate linearly in time, aka presentism.

Remember the Great Lama who thought that our unreal reality was the perfect illusion down to the smallest detail? I reminded him that a ‘difference’ that makes no difference is no difference.

In full, the above implies that a ‘difference’ in the implementation, which is only the messenger, that makes no difference to the result, which is the message, is indeed no difference.

For example, music is a message, as a result/product, but its implementation, being the messenger, can be a live band, a music CD, an mp3 playing on a device, etc.

So it is that while the message of us operating though a series of nows of Presentism is important for some reason, such as to enhance our zest and therefore our experience, it may well be that in the implementation we are actually traversing through our world-line in the Block Universe. We have no way to tell the difference.

We still lean toward there being Presentism because we can’t jump to a past or a future in our world-line; however, this would require a higher dimensionality than we have.

To us, where we are in this block looking at it from the inside and also looking out from the inside of our brains (which brain is ever only what one views), it is as if, for practical purposes, that we live in a presentism of only our fleeting nows, for we can’t access the past or the future and so they might as well not be there.

It could be that Eternalism exactly matches what we would have done in a real Presentism because once did, but in a flash that’s now being much more slowly replayed.

Also, apparently, we became to fully attend to our conscious, second story unaware of the first storey where all the machinery of the subconsciousness analysis of the neural network resides, although science now informs us of it.

[PoeticUniverse]

6. The Universe has to be incredibly large.

This is because the infinitesimal is so incredibly minuscule, presumably a necessity for flexibility of construction.

Perhaps we can only operate at the mid-point.

A Star in the Dark:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irQ2vi1n4Xs


7. The nature of our universe is of a specific structure with specific initial conditions.

Fine tuning by God. This also matches Einstein’s Block Universe that is very particular.


8. Human nature must be imperfect.

There can be only one God, plus perfection would be boring, and creatures and their natures are of a non personal general-for-all recipe of ingredients that can let life happen and be lived.

If we were Angels, life would be so just;
Instead, we try, we push, we climb, we lust,
We dance, we dream, we feel, and love with zest;
Yes, all this, thanks to the beast within us!


9. We can learn and thus enlarge the range of useful decisions in our repertoire, good or bad.

Sadly, this is kind of moot, as is free will, since the Block Universe is pre-determined, as God knows all that is; so, it appears that our Earthly benefit is experience itself and so those who can learn better will improve their experiencing more. Fixed will supports our consistency and survival to better experience life; the will can never be free of the will. ‘Random’, if there is any, harms the will.

In any case… even with Presentism:

The brain’s decisions are determined by
Memories, associations, and
Learned behaviors right up to the instant;
So—our decisions are predetermined.

The ‘free’ in free will has no real meaning,
Unless we take it to mean ‘random’, that
One’s will depends on nothing but dice rolls;
What good would such a brain be anyway?

Can you start or stop your thoughts? In other words,
Can you will that which does the willing? Try it.
Oops, a surprise thought just came from the blue;
You did not will it—the will is not free!

The subconscious brain, with billion of nerve cells,
Does all of our decision-analysis,
Only making its results known, at the last,
To the brain’s highest level: consciousness.

People act, robot-like, since they know not
The why of what they do, for decisions
Are made blind, by brain networks, just before
They’re presented to us in consciousness.

Consciousness comes three hundred milliseconds
After the brain completes analysis,
And, thus has no last-second veto power,
Over what the brain has come up with.

Decisions are not made by consciousness,
Although, this fine picture in the mind’s ‘I’,
Merely the brain’s perception of itself,
Is fed back whole for future shortcutting.

Not much of what the brain does reaches
Consciousness, and even when it does,
The mind’s last to know, being like a tourist—
For decisions precede their awareness.

First-level people have beliefs and desires,
But second-level people can have beliefs
And desires about their beliefs and desires,
Becoming able spectators of themselves.

Although our decisions of the instant are
Fully determined, and are therefore not free,
We may happen to learn something new—and make
Choices tomorrow we wouldn’t make today.

We’re all robots, but no one notices
Since there are so many different kinds,
Which, though making life quite interesting,
Obscures the fact that the will is unfree.

[PoeticUniverse]

10. God is all there is. There is not something else sitting around in addition to God as Absolute.

Thus we and nature have to be God stuff.

We are as Brahman’s dreams/thoughts, being less than God, but still in God, just as our own night-dreams are less than us.


11. An Absolute—God—cannot be made or ever go away. It’s permanent.

God is deathless and ungenerated, just as Parmenides supposed about the One.


12. Everything Actually Happened Live—All at Once?

The saving grace fo who know what would be that all the events in the Block Universe had to actually happen once, even if rather instantly, as the Universe’s Living Poem recorded in Stone in the Great Slab Block as God’s permanent outlook—which hints of a near Presentism turning into Eternalism because of something like the curious property of light not being able to age because no time passes for it (photons cannot decay and have no delay).

Thus, Eternalism’s slow-motion replay that we now feel as Presentism matches what really happened at some point.

The Oddness of Light Photons

Light is ‘null’ to time—not a part of it,
Nor is light of space—it makes space-time ‘lit’.
On a light beam there’s no extent or time!
Light seems to have neither reason nor rhyme.

Already There

Light’s full speed in a true vacuum
Of no time and no space is as ‘infinite’,
For it is already everywhere;
In other words: everywhere in no time.

The Zero-Point Extended

This point of creation-annihilation
Is extended into a faux reality,
Both by finite consciousness and by
Light slowed by virtual particle pairs.

Light/Matter

Light photons colliding make for
Electrons and positrons, and vice-versa,
With the forward-time of photons being
Canceled by the backward-time gravitons.

Phantasmal Being

Each ‘now’ that’s created and recreated
Over the various relative quanta
Has really already happened, coming, going,
And never ever returning, gone in a flash.

Once Upon a ‘Time’

Of course, it did all really happen ‘once’,
As in all-at-once, in the timeless realm
That must be the state of the ‘eternal’ IS,
With IS being close to what’s called the ‘Wiz’.

The Play

Our ‘reality’ is as a flip-book’s pages turning,
The still pictures changing a bit, granting
An apparent motion, such as in a movie;
However, we do get to experience it!

Come and Gone

Like the light from a star already spent,
Our ‘get up and go’ has long gone and went.
We all birthed, lived, and died right away;
There’s nothing left but the slo-mo replay.

Being Nothingness

Our parentheses in eternity
Flashes as a twinkling, but’s extended
By ‘time’ into a phantasmic life dream
That’s existent the same as if it were.

The Mechanics of Reality

The result, being the message, is undeniable,
But herein we speak of the messenger,
Which is the implementation,
As that of a recording, over a live band.

What Makes No Difference is No Difference

There is no difference in what makes none;
‘Eternalism’ is now playing, the living film—
A reality show in the inner theater
Of the mind’s eye, with the ‘I’ observing.

Lighting the Way

Our finite speed of light, ‘c’, is such
Because it is slowed by virtual particles,
But, even so, to ride it makes time instant,
With all space shrinking to a point.

Never/Ever Becoming

What’s said to be eternal isn’t made—
It’s here, from not anything, with no debit paid,
Which is to say, too, it’s not from anywhere,
And that seems pretty much like from nowhere.

No Source

Well, there’s nothing to make anything of,
So, then, that is ever what it’s made of,
Whether eternal or always becoming
Of that nether-land of the law of no laws.

Uncaused

For what is causeless there is no point
At which any specific direction
Can be imparted to it; thus, there is none:
Everything that is possible doth happen.

The Shimmering Gleam

We butterflies, on the edge of forever’s flight,
Spread fast our wings on the ocean of light
That is of the ageless photonic opposing waves
In no time, mass, or space that is thereby made.

Here and Now Seeming

We are as beings of the everlasting light dream,
As products time and time again by its means,
Of the eternal return, as baubles blown and burst,
Though frames of time that quench life’s thirst.

Nowhere Man/Woman

Time future, time present, and time past
Are all at once, with not a bit of it to last.
The glorious light flashes us into being shone,
As the light eternal of all time to be known.

[PoeticUniverse]

13. Conclusion

Given that there can be an Absolute…

God is the Block Universe and we are in God.


We, of the endless forms most beautiful,
Are stunned that our glass to the brim is full,
Life’s wine coursing through us, as magical,
On this lovely, rolling sphere so bountiful.

To future columns we stretch our present row,
By a lifeline of tenuously spun vow.
Oh, how soon the weighted web begins to fail;
The only real time under our feet is now.

Life’s a web, of whos, whys, whats, and hows,
Stretched as time between eternal boughs.
Gossamer threads bear the beads that glisten,
Each moment a sequence of instant nows.

No matter how one tries to shake from boughs
The fruits of truth from the Tree of Knows;
Computation makes not yet the morrows;
There’s naught else but lone, resultant Nows.

Memory’s ideas recall the last heard tone;
Sensation savors what is presently known;
Imagination anticipates coming sounds;
The delight is such that none could produce alone.

THE END of the Analysis of God

[Nick_A]

Poeticuniverse

5. The message of our reality in this universe is that we operate linearly in time, aka presentism.

We agree that the ineffable is beyond our comprehension but it is possible that human beings can evolve from the duality of animal consciousness into the triunity of human consciousness and better understand presentism

What if our senses have us appreciate the worlds reactions in linear time but actually creation takes place in vertical time. Can we evolve to experience it?

There are damning problems with the scheme of Presentism as a sequence of nows with the past not kept and the future not yet existing, the first problem being its unrelenting besiegement by Einstein’s relativity of simultaneity.

Second, the turning of a ‘now’ into the next ‘now’ sits on the thinnest knife edge imaginable, the previous ‘now’ wholly consumed in the making of the new ‘now’ all over the universe at once in a dynamical updating—the present now exhausting all reality. It’s not that the incredibly short Planck time couldn’t be the processing time, but… I don’t know; what do the readers think?

Now doesn’t exist by definition in a changing universe. However what if the block universe is NOW. Change then takes place within NOW. It is like an infinite kaleidoscope or NOW in which the process of change takes place.

Time, as I understand it, is the eternal repetition of a moment. It is the first dimension without length, width or depth. I know zero dimension or a point as a vertical limit. The first dimension of length is created by stringing points or vertical limits together. The second dimension of width or eternity is created by extending all the moments of time out in a 90 degree angle producing a plane. The whole of eternity then occurs in eternal repetition. Extending the points of eternity out at 90 degree angles produces a cube or the third dimension of time which includes all possible eternities.

Time is relative. A day in the life of a paramecium is felt differently then a day in the life of Man or a day in the life of our earth. Time is a vertical reality we experience linearly depending upon its origin or being.

Experiencing Now requires going beyond dualistic thought and opening to experience the reality of vertical time. But how many want to? Most prefer to sustain the eternal battle over opinions.

[PoeticUniverse]

what if the block universe is NOW. Change then takes place within NOW. It is like an infinite kaleidoscope or NOW in which the process of change takes place.

The Block Universe is a finished and complete Picture of All Change, and so wherever we are traversing in it is a 'now' to us and so as seeming to us the same as a 'now' in presentism as in a live process of change.

Thanks for continuing in the thread. I figured the best logical 'God' view that I could come up with. As for adoration, worship, bowing down, Biblical Scriptures, purpose, testing, punishing, and such as gaining salvation, I leave that to man to uselessly proclaim and argue opinions about in all the varied religions.

[Nick_A]

what if the block universe is NOW. Change then takes place within NOW. It is like an infinite kaleidoscope or NOW in which the process of change takes place.

The Block Universe is a finished and complete Picture of All Change, and so wherever we are traversing in it is a 'now' to us and so as seeming to us the same as a 'now' in presentism as in a live process of change.

Thanks for continuing in the thread. I figured the best logical 'God' view that I could come up with. As for adoration, worship, bowing down, Biblical Scriptures, purpose, testing, punishing, and such as gaining salvation, I leave that to man to uselessly proclaim and argue opinions about in all the varied religions.

The block universe and its seven levels of reality may be complete. However the vertical processes of involution and conscious evolution can occur within now and the cause of the sixth dimension or all possible eternities