IC please clarify for us

[promethean75]

Gentlemen, the radio is broken. Thirteen billion years is a long time, and a lot can happen to a giant bowl of particle soup in that amount of time. For all we know, a brief period of a few hundred thousand million years is enough for a spot in space to become a thermodynamic pump and start turning out organic materials that combine to produce little creatures.

Maybe this is why we are all existentialists in despair. We know we're just a fluke of nature. A totally random event that shouldn't have even happened and had all the odds against it... but still, it happened. It stirred around for a while with all manner of strange creatures popping up... and then, one day, a rock the size of greenland that began as a chunk blown away from a star that exploded three million light years ago was making it's way through our solar system and damned if the erf didn't get right in its way.

And just like that, the whole epic story was over. Everything for naught. The quest for fire, the wheel, the empires, the Shakespeares, the cure for cancer, and the finally affordable space tourism, all of it gone. Decimated by a goddamn flying rock traveling 128,000 miles an hour through space.

You just keep tellin' yourselves there's a god and a heaven and all that bullocks, mmkay? When that rock comes a callin' you're gonna f*** around 'n find out.

[promethean75]

On the matter of the odds of self-organizing complexity arising without design, i see your argument and raise you one metaphysics.

What are the odds of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnimalevolent level 5 marvel character that never began to exist, always has existed and will always exist, existing, without positing for it, also, some designer (a god's god)?

It is essentially a Spinozean query. Why does Nature need a designer but 'god' does not? To eliminate these trifles, we must imagine that the two are synonymous... and not in the logically cheesy way the monotheists do it: "bro, everything is god, but god created everything and transcends it all kinda. So there's god, and then there's creation... but they're the same thing, bro! God emineminates... or emanates, rather."

I'm like.

[Alexis Jacobi]

See, if you’d only have listened to Promethean starting years ago you’d be in a better place by now!

As it is God help us all …

[phyllo]

When I said "other states" I did not have in mind "other planets with life" etc.

Well I used "planets" because I think it's less abstract and easier to understand than "states".

But you are referring to actual existence and I am saying "state" does not. The "states" are all POSSIBLE existence with one of the states "real".

The argument was "how improbable THIS existence" and I was countering with THIS/THE not the same as A(n) existence.

Thus, it is certain that we are in A state in which thinking beings exist able to ponder this question. Only if the number of POSSIBLE states that include thinking beings is finite would the low probability of being in a particular one matter.

The set that contains all sets which include X and anything else would be of the same order of infinity as the set of all sets not including X.

The universe supports life.

But there is no way to know if that is simply the characteristic of a universe or if a god had to construct such a universe.

There is no way to calculate the probabilities.

On the other hand, the point that the earth, the moon and the sun are exactly in the perfect alignment for life is easily explained by the vast number of solar systems in the universe. There is a very high likelihood that a least one solar system has the perfect conditions.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Actually, no. Personal choice doesn't affect reality. And while it's common these days to imagine that what one believes is like one's football team...a matter of personal taste and optionality...the problem with that is that while there is no "right" football team, there is a right picture of the world.

One only chooses whether one will line up with the truth, or will prefer something unreal. All unreal choices, in this matter, lead to the same end.

Your argument, naturally, is: the Universe is exactly as it is no matter how one “imagines” it. This is quite logical as the physical world goes. It is what it is and does not shape-shift. And the domain of establishing what the world and the Universe really are (is) certainly involves stripping away everything that it is not, right?

The pursuit of ‘truth’ has done quite a number on fanciful and whimsical descriptions of reality.

We are still rather far away from defining, by way of reducing definitions out of existent religious systems, what metaphysical principles we might isolate as being universal. But in all such conversations that would be — is — my objective.

[phyllo]

Of course, IC believes that the universe "is" exactly as he "imagines" it to be.

[Alexis Jacobi]

What are the odds of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnimalevolent level 5 marvel character that never began to exist, always has existed and will always exist, existing, without positing for it, also, some designer (a god's god)?

But that’s just the point. Whatever is meant by the term “god” in all systems (or as Dubious suggested ‘Brahman’)(though he referred abstractly to Nature) cannot but exist. There is no alternative. And we participate in this awareness (of existing, seeing, being aware). . It could never not exist. So ‘existence’ is really the matter at hand.

The odd are therefore entirely in favor of the only thing that is: existence. It is not even a question of odds.

[Alexis Jacobi]

But this is precisely the point: mathematically impossible things require an explanation. And the more apparently impossible the mathematics of the thing becomes, the more it demands an explanation.

Once on realizes that existence itself is the thing, the activity that arises from that is to delve into that realization. The best examples of cultures and civilizations that have intensified that awareness and realization are those of the ancient East.

The proposition of mathematical improbability arises strictly in our late Modern context. It is a scientific idea exclusively. And Meyer et al’s use of it is only to circle back around to a mysterious state of not having all the answers.

But in other moments in history a realization of that sort would not have been necessary, nor would it have arisen as a point-of-argument.

[Dubious]

My sense is that Dubious’ position is largely against the ridiculousness of a shallow religious picture that, and this is crucial, has no explanatory value or utility.

...that's only the beginning. Its ramifications are deep and detrimental, psychologically, historically and not least politically and culturally; I would also add, metaphysically. However, it's useless to expound further. Forgive the interruption with your preferred interlocutor.

Btw, based on the Hindu tradition one subscribes to BRAHMAN can also be denoted as that from which nature itself flows and consequently everything in existence including the deities we invent. That's the version metaphorically I most collude with, a state where even nature has a beginning.

[promethean75]

Of course, existence has to exist. We don't need that explained. What's remarkable is that the right elements fell into proximity on a planet in a random solar system for organic life to happen. That's the odds thing that's really fucked up.

Galaxies, solar systems... those are a dime a dozen. But who would have thought that a little water, some electricity, and a few gases would end up mixing and causing life. Life that multiplies, no less.

One time... sure, no prob. Lightning strikes and some amino acids become living cells. But then these cells aren't inert phenomena like the lightning and the gases and all the components that aren't 'alive'. These fuckin' things reproduce themselves, move around and are goal oriented. Some seriously creepy shit.

That's the mystery. Why didn't the first cells fall apart or just stop functioning. What made the first polymeric molecules fuckin' copy themselves and keep doing so for millions of years? Bro, that's creepy af.

[Alexis Jacobi]

...that's only the beginning. Its ramifications are deep and detrimental, psychologically, historically and not least politically and culturally; I would also add, metaphysically. However, it's useless to expound further. Forgive the interruption with your preferred interlocutor.

By “its ramifications” I take that to mean “belief in a storybook model”? You seem to have very clear notions of what is detrimental on all those levels, but as far as I am aware I do not remember you expounding on that.

Myself, living as I do in a culture still rather ‘primitive’ and even in certain ways pre-modern, I notice that the social fabric remains more cohesive when I compare what Inobserve here (rural Colombia) with notably degeneration on many different levels when I visit up north.

[Dubious]

Of course, existence has to exist.

Yes, to be ontologically precise, Being is not Nothing is a good place to start. The more nouns it yields within the circumference and anonymity of Being the closer we get to discovering the whole enchilada in detail. Beings retroactively reflecting on Being once established that Being, even as an abstraction, must precede all the little beings fated to follow into an endless cycle of Being, being a joy forever to behold.

[Dubious]

...that's only the beginning. Its ramifications are deep and detrimental, psychologically, historically and not least politically and culturally; I would also add, metaphysically. However, it's useless to expound further. Forgive the interruption with your preferred interlocutor.

By “its ramifications” I take that to mean “belief in a storybook model”? You seem to have very clear notions of what is detrimental on all those levels, but as far as I am aware I do not remember you expounding on that.

I have no idea how you came to that conclusion based on what I wrote. There's nothing "storybook" about it. Also, not everything has to be very clear to acknowledge an obvious tendency.