@KellyJay saidThe classical bit that constitutes the information processed by computers, which can assume two values (usually 1 or 0), is the smallest unit of data. For information of this sort to have any kind of meaning there must be a substrate. A substrate is something that "underlies" the data, and gives it some kind of context so that the data can be interpreted in some way.
https://youtu.be/tMnGmjpgUJE
Very small talk on bits of information comparing a dictionary to life.
2 minutes and 29 sec long.
Egyptian hieroglyphs were unable to be made sense of for centuries, even though many of the hieroglyphs are clearly pictures of things. It wasn't until the Rosetta Stone was discovered that any breakthrough was made, since ancient Greek was known to scholars.
There is, in my view these days, a need for a substrate for quantum mechanics and, just generally, all physical phenomena. This is why I'm inclined toward what's called analytical idealism, which takes consciousness as being an irreducible, fundamental basis of reality. Felt experiences carry their own intrinsic meanings to the one feeling, appear to be decidedly non-algorithmic and incapable of being rendered as finite bit strings, and make up the contents of the most basic sort of phenomenal consciousness. Think of something like the will in Schopenhauer's metaphysics. Pure volition, blind yet striving, incapable of meta-cognition in its raw state, yet driven to have experiences and play with patterns.
Felt experiences clearly constitute each of our everyday, immediate, subjective perspectives on existence. That is our only given in life. Everything else is an abstraction, and that includes matter, energy, time, and space. All the meaning we perceive in life emerges from the meaning inherent in the all-pervading field of consciousness at the bottom of everything. The "will," or "mind at large," or whatever you want to call it. From that simple field arose all the complexity, structure, and meaning we perceive around us. We are mind.
As for the god issue, which I know motivates most of your threads, I'll just say that it makes far more sense, to me, that consciousness "strives" to know itself, and that is what drives the simplest form of consciousness that is the ground of reality to grow more complex until it's able to become self-aware. Self-awareness, or meta-cognition, is just consciousness "turned in on itself." To have a fully self-aware and intelligent god at the beginning, who then goes on to create inferior forms of consciousness such as humans, is just teleologically upside-down to me.
So, I can only meet you halfway on what reality is all about. It is mental in nature, not physical, so that it carries inherent meaning, but the god hypothesis seems extraneous.
@Soothfast saidEverything in the universe, from consciousness, mental states, learning, teaching,
The classical bit that constitutes the information processed by computers, which can assume two values (usually 1 or 0), is the smallest unit of data. For information of this sort to have any kind of meaning there must be a substrate. A substrate is something that "underlies" the data, and gives it some kind of context so that the data can be interpreted in some way.
...[text shortened]... nature, not physical, so that it carries inherent meaning, but the god hypothesis seems extraneous.
and understanding, is as much a part of the universe as the charge on an
electron. This includes time, mass, space, and energy each part of the whole must
be explained together in some systematic meta-narrative if we don't connect all
of the dots, we leave gaping holes. Some do that with intent, their narratives are
used to explain some pieces, but doesn't work when taking in the whole thing so
they ignore that outside of their narrative.
Bits of data don't necessarily mean there is information outside of Shannon
information, within life, or a computer. Where the HUGE leap comes is when
those data bits carry information that can be interpreted because some
level of syntactic and semantic information is there due to the arrangement.
This highlights two extremely important things immediately, we can see
something more than just the 0 and 1, or letters, there is interpretation going on.
You can read the letters of a book not because there are bits of oddly shaped ink
scattered across pages, but due to the arrangement of ink on paper.
A meta-narrative must include this ability to know, understand, and recognize
any meaning that the material world has in how it is put together. Radio
communication would be worthless if all of them could send but none receive, or
they were all able to receive when nothing was being sent.
Without God, your narrative cannot explain it all, so the best you have is I don't
know. If your mind/brain isn't tuned into the whole with the ability to send and
receive information it is no different from a rock when it comes to understanding
and without design building that into us, you think a mindless, purposeless,
a goalless process in which no one can explain could?
@KellyJay saidThe idea that a subjective field of consciousness, what I'll call "Mind," is the ground of reality implies more than the irreducibility of experiences such as feeling the emotion of love or seeing the color red. By its very nature we should expect consciousness, even of the raw, instinctual sort envisioned by Schopenhauer, to have some kind of "structure" or patterned mode of action.
Everything in the universe, from consciousness, mental states, learning, teaching,
and understanding, is as much a part of the universe as the charge on an
electron. This includes time, mass, space, and energy each part of the whole must
be explained together in some systematic meta-narrative if we don't connect all
of the dots, we leave gaping holes. Some do that with ...[text shortened]... t into us, you think a mindless, purposeless,
a goalless process in which no one can explain could?
We each are dissociated "alters" of Mind. Here the terms "dissociation" and "alter" are used rather as in psychiatry when describing dissociative identity disorder. Mental contents can become dissociated when they undergo a disruption of and/or discontinuity in their normal integration with a greater collection of mental contents such as that which constitutes the so-called ego. In this case substitute "Mind" for "ego."
"Normal integration" of mental contents here means mental contents that are connected to the "primary identity" through chains of cognitive associations, such as the way in which some sensory perception may evoke an abstract idea, which in turn might recall a memory, which in turn could spark a thought, which in turn may motivate an action, and so on.
Mind has a natural inclination to dissociate, ultimately giving rise to the likes of you and I. We are part of Mind, but our sense of identity and autonomy lies in the fact that we are alters of Mind, dissociated from the greater whole, yet still a part of it. Physical reality is what we perceive with our senses, on the "screen of perception." The physical world "out there" is a representation on our screen of perception of the activities of the un-dissociated portion of Mind, called Mind-at-Large (MAL). Thus all reality is mentation. All of reality that we perceive emerges from the excitations of a primordial, unitary field of consciousness.
Our quibble here is that Mind as described above is not really what you conceive of as God. In its raw state Mind is not explicitly self-aware, does not of its own volition draft blueprints for creating universes and biological organisms, does not plan things out, or think of itself as "I." It is pure, endogenous experience.
Perceptual representations (sights, sounds, etc.) are patterns of excitation within the mental contents of alters of Mind, whereas MAL has strictly endogenous experiences. MAL does not "see" things, but its human alters "see" representations of MAL's activities through the use of eyes that themselves are highly organized mental constructs that send sights to a brain (also a mental construct) that serves to "filter" and "interpret" the sights. The brain is not a classical computer, but it is loosely analogous to a complex data processing center that enables self-reflective and meta-cognitive mental activities. Think of an algorithm or computer program: it is not a "thing" in the physical sense, but it is a way to process information, the difference here being that human cognition goes beyond mere processing to also interpret information, reflect on it, draw meaning from it, and perform volitional acts on the basis of it. Ultimately, Mind could be said to be a kind of dynamic data structure imbued with a meta-narrative and the capacity to organize itself for purposes of meta-cognition. Consciousness is the key ingredient, though.
Now, Mind has properties. It is not random. Just as a string on a guitar has natural frequencies, and has a tendency to vibrate in certain notes but not in others, so too is Mind a kind of substrate (like a string) that has natural modes of excitation. Consciousness it nothing without this kind of natural, innate coherence. A substrate's natural modes of excitation are determined by the substrate's essential properties. For a guitar string the essential properties are the string's length, elasticity, chemical composition, and so on.
Now, with force -- pressing upon a guitar string with a finger, say -- one can cause the string to vibrate in just about any arbitrary frequency. This is interference. Between MAL and its alters there is a lot of interference, because each center of consciousness is playing its own tune. In this way we find the physical universe that we perceive to be a distorted representation of the natural modes of excitation of MAL. In this way, indeed, we see how the universe can seem chaotic and random, just as overlapping ripples created by multiple stones being thrown in a pond can seem chaotic.
The natural modes of excitation of Mind could be fairly surmised (and Schopenhauer does posit this) to be much like Platonic ideals. Purely mathematical ideas would be an example. A triangle is something we can conceive in our thoughts as a perfect form, but any representation of a triangle -- say by drawing one on a piece of paper -- is going to fall short of the ideal. Thus we do not perceive, with our senses, perfect triangles in the physical universe, only rough approximations. Nonetheless the approximation of a triangle on a piece of paper points to something with an inherent meaning. A real idea that is eternal, and reflects something essential about Mind itself. This is a toy example, but I hope it makes some sense. More complex examples range up to notions such as physical laws, Jungian archetypes and higher. All of these reflect something of Mind's essential nature.
Mind dissociates. One could theorize it has a telos -- a goal of some sort -- but Mind is not explicitly aware of it. It has an instinctual drive to know itself, say, or experience all that there is to experience, which its essential nature (its natural modes of excitation) expresses through the creation of universes and biological organisms. A basic, raw consciousness, through its own innate, patterned, archetypal nature, should naturally want to develop the ability to meta-cognate; that is, reflect on itself, and become self-aware. Mind in and of itself is not random! It provides the structure we see in the universe, and is the root of all meaning.
Now, the God of the Bible to me is in a strange predicament. It is purported to be all and know all, and so there is lacking any kind of reasonable telos. It cannot improve itself, because it is already perfect, self-aware and omniscient. Such an entity should not have any motivation to do anything but bask in a static or cycling state of perfection. There should not be any incentive for such an entity to create lesser forms of consciousness, especially since it gives rise to imperfection and suffering. It is for this reason that I cannot subscribe to the God hypothesis.
42d
@Soothfast saidGod according to scripture is Holy, Righteous, and Good to name a few of His attributes. Holy means to be set apart, He isn’t the universe, it cannot contain Him, everything in the universe owes its existence to God, including the immaterial and the material. He is outside of time, space, unhindered by what constrains us, free to act as He wills. With His only constrains His nature, like He cannot lie.
The idea that a subjective field of consciousness, what I'll call "Mind," is the ground of reality implies more than the irreducibility of experiences such as feeling the emotion of love or seeing the color red. By its very nature we should expect consciousness, even of the raw, instinctual sort envisioned by Schopenhauer, to have some kind of "structure" or patterned mode ...[text shortened]... to imperfection and suffering. It is for this reason that I cannot subscribe to the God hypothesis.
42d
2 edits
@KellyJay saidSo, let me just emphasize that Mind is not apart from the universe. The physical universe is a representation on our "screen of perception" of the goings-on of MAL (Mind-at-Large), just as the instrument panel in the cockpit of a plane is a representation of an "outside world" that informs a pilot of such things as altitude, wind velocity, temperature, and so on. A gauge will say "The wind speed is 50 km/hr," but of course the gauge is not itself actually the wind. By the same token, I could witness a flash of lightning and think of it as comprised of electrical charge conveyed by particles, but the lightning is a representation of something MAL is up to—an excitation of that underlying field of unified consciousness.
God according to scripture is Holy, Righteous, and Good to name a few of His attributes. Holy means to be set apart, He isn’t the universe, it cannot contain Him, everything in the universe owes its existence to God, including the immaterial and the material. He is outside of time, space, unhindered by what constrains us, free to act as He wills. With His only constrains His nature, like He cannot lie.
And being pure, irreducible, raw consciousness, Mind (i.e. MAL and its alters taken together) may be expected to operate according to certain archetypes. Whatever one may think of Carl Gustav Jung's psychiatric methodologies (which involved dream interpretation), he did write extensively about a kind of metaphysics that is not incompatible with the main tenets of analytical idealism, and one useful idea he advanced was the concept of an archetype. I'll just rip off from Wikipedia here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jungian_archetypes
Jungian archetypes are a concept from psychology that refers to a universal, inherited idea, pattern of thought, or image that is present in the collective unconscious of all human beings.
Jung conjectured—rightly I think—that numbers have an archetypal character, and so, by extension, mathematical ideas in general constitute an archetype. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Wolgang Pauli took this quite seriously, and he and Jung corresponded extensively in the 1950s. If the ground of reality is Mind, and human consciousness is an extension of Mind (as dissociated alters), we should expect that MAL has archetypes in common with human mentation. Not self-awareness, no, but then, self-awareness (meta-cognition) is not an archetype.
Eugene Wigner, another eminent physicist, wondered in a paper published in Nature (I think) at the "miracle" that the physical universe can be so elegantly described using mathematical equations. The laws of physics are mathematical, and a priori mathematical reasoning seems to often predict such laws, even before a single experimental result has been obtained to suggest it. Why should this be?
Well, if what we call "physical" reality is a representation of the mentation of MAL, and numbers are a mental archetype, then we should very much expect that the representations we detect on our "screen of perception" (the universe or world around us) should be mathematically patterned. Mathematics is NOT consciousness, but it is a template—one of many—that organizes conscious processes and their sensory representations.
Now, back to your point about God being "apart" from the universe. Again, Mind is not like that. The universe is within Mind. It is the mentation of MAL as perceived by its alters on the screens of perception of those alters. There is absolutely nothing "outside" Mind. As a matter of fact, the screen of perception, which is comprised of all five senses, is essentially what forms the boundary between MAL and one of its alters, and in more technical treatments it is called a Markov blanket. The interplay between MAL and an alter, consisting of all sensory perceptions (from the point of view of the alter having sensory organs) occurs within the Markov blanket, and here is where we observe our quantum mechanical probabilities and uncertainties, since both the alter and MAL have free will. That is, they are not 100% subject to chains of cause-and-effect, or the principle of causality, which in any case is a metaphysical principle that may be a mere local epiphenomenon of a more general (non-local) principle called synchronicity. It was the idea of synchronicity, which is fundamentally acausal, that Jung and Pauli corresponded about at length. I won't delve into it here.
Next, to your point about God being outside time and space. Here I'll be more brief, and say simply that time and space are emergent from mental processes as well. Our brains, themselves representations of a mentation process, receive "data" from sensory organs and have to organize it somehow. The scaffolding for this organization, which gives the "data" a structure, is what we perceive as time and space. Even a virtual-reality headset does this: a view of a mountain in the headset is a representation of data that, by itself, is comprised of abstract Shannon information. Just ones and zeros. This is only an analogy, and I am not saying reality is pure information. As I said in my first post above, information needs a substrate. Mind is the substrate.
40d
@Soothfast saidIt isn't all about us.
So, let me just emphasize that Mind is not apart from the universe. The physical universe is a representation on our "screen of perception" of the goings-on of MAL (Mind-at-Large), just as the instrument panel in the cockpit of a plane is a representation of an "outside world" that informs a pilot of such things as altitude, wind velocity, temperature, and so on. A gauge ...[text shortened]... ormation. As I said in my first post above, information needs a substrate. Mind is the substrate.
40d
@KellyJay saidAt this point perhaps I should just be explicit about what all I've said really means for "us": There isn't really an "us." There isn't really an "I" and there isn't really a "you." By "real" I mean here something that is irreducible (i.e. explainable as a sum of its parts) or has an autonomous, independent existence. "We" are, each of us, parts of a greater whole. That whole is a unitary field of consciousness. Any sense of individual identity or self is, as the Buddha says, merely an illusion.
It isn't all about us.
40d
@Soothfast saidGod created the universe He stands apart from it, while what you are doing in your "we" and "I" are talking about us as something else that stands apart. In Christ, we are a part of the author of life's family, joined to our creator, who holds together the universe by the power of His Word.
At this point perhaps I should just be explicit about what all I've said really means for "us": There isn't really an "us." There isn't really an "I" and there isn't really a "you." By "real" I mean here something that is irreducible (i.e. explainable as a sum of its parts) or has an autonomous, independent existence. "We" are, each of us, parts of a greater whol ...[text shortened]... consciousness. Any sense of individual identity or self is, as the Buddha says, merely an illusion.
40d
@KellyJay saidNo, no, no. A delusion is real-seeming to the one having a delusion. That's what all these pronouns like "we" and "I" are referring to. The delusions. Without such pronouns "we" would have a very hard time having this conversation, language would be stunted, and "we" would be all that much more handicapped in our quest to arrive at the Truth.
God created the universe He stands apart from it, while what you are doing in your "we" and "I" are talking about us as something else that stands apart. In Christ, we are a part of the author of life's family, joined to our creator, who holds together the universe by the power of His Word.
Presumably you are not well acquainted with Buddhist philosophy, which essentially sees all reality as being one Mind, and all so-called "individuals" being manifestations of that Mind. But any sense of individuality is born of delusion.
A ripple in a lake may fancy itself as being separate and autonomous, a "thing-in-itself" whose existence is, in a fundamental sense, independent of all else. But it is really part of the lake. It could not "be" without the water of the lake.
A dissociated center of consciousness in a person's mind, such as an alternate identity or personality (a phenomenon well-documented in the literature) may see itself as being a separate, autonomous consciousness in its own right, but the dissociation owes its sense of identity to a delusion. In this case the "delusion" is due to a deficit of cognitive associations that would normally link it to the mental contents of the executive ego (the primary personality). Such cognitive associations are what would allow the alternate personality to recognize that it is but a facet of a greater whole, and not really a separate entity. Indeed, as has been done countless times in clinical psychology, with the right therapy the missing associations may be "rediscovered" and so allow the alternate to reintegrate with the whole. Our relationship to Mind is analogous to this.
40d
@Soothfast saidWe live and have our being in a creation made by God, who not only made everything from the air we breathe to every molecule across all of time and space, so we share in our current state of affairs as individuals. Joined together by the one who created us, we now spend much of our time dividing ourselves into groups, justifying hating one another for this reason or that.
No, no, no. A delusion is real-seeming to the one having a delusion. That's what all these pronouns like "we" and "I" are referring to. The delusions. Without such pronouns "we" would have a very hard time having this conversation, language would be stunted, and "we" would be all that much more handicapped in our quest to arrive at the Truth.
Presumably you are not w ...[text shortened]... o allow the alternate to reintegrate with the whole. Our relationship to Mind is analogous to this.