In God's Image

Religion and Secularism
243

Your thoughts, your consciousness, the so-called “Hard Problem”
Whereas “reality” is confined to
atoms, molecules, the laws of physics and biology, the observable stuff of this reality we live, the stuff that creates our body and brain.

Can you recognize that the thoughts unfolding within your mind are of a different order, then the stuff your brain is made out of?

Specifically, the Magisteria of Physical Reality vs the Magisteria of our Human Mindscape .

In this perspective we acknowledge that Earth and her physical processes and the pageant of evolution are the fundamental timeless touchstones of reality. Part of Earth’s physical reality is that we humans were created by Earth out of her processes.

Science shows us that we belong to the mammalian branch of Earth’s animal kingdom. Yet, it’s undeniable that something quite unique happened about six million years ago when certain apes took a wild improbable evolutionary turn.

By and by besides the marvel of . . .

{Hey I’m done, it is finished. I’ve got my room in the historic Strater for another night, so I can relax with this margarita, take a nice long nap, with no alarm, and then drive home and call it another wonderful crazy fun helping people have a good time and being a part of that good time. What a ride. If I had more focus I could write a hell of story about the back of house and the guest, etc. Although there’s other stuff I’d rather write about. But next gotta focus on planting a little bitty corn crop, and helping get the greenhouses in order.}

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citizenschallengev4 - "Your thoughts, your consciousness, the so-called “Hard Problem” Whereas “reality” is confined to atoms, molecules, the laws of physics and biology, the observable stuff of this reality we live, the stuff that creates our body and brain."

Really!? Are you going to do the old atheist version of “my god is the Real God” nonsense now?

Your definition of “reality” is not what I’m talking to. So quit pretending it is. My guess is you know what I have been saying but have political reasons that prohibit you from giving an inch. (which would be very Mitch McConnellist of you, so give us all a break)

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"It obviously means a lot more to you, but I’m not getting what that is."

Actually it means a lot less to me than it does to you which is the problem. You can’t get your beliefs and expectations about the forces of nature out of the way for the micro second it would take to realize the simplicity I’m pointing to.

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You are one of the most difficult people I’ve encountered on this forum. I don’t mean all the people who just talk nonsense or are insulting, thankfully, you don’t do that. I mean the way you have not moved much from your earliest posts. You insist that what you say is simple, but never take the simple steps of using different words, or maybe an analogy, or really any other approach to talking about it. Instead, you keep going further and further down the road of deciding that there is something wrong with the listeners. This is typical psychology when people disagree, so, nothing I take personally, or fault you for.

I’m not sure how I would get my expectations about the forces of nature out of the way. They aren’t something I read about in some CS Lewis book and just form a belief system around. They are the things that I’ve witnessed every day, studied in biology from 6th grade and up through college, as well as physics, and all the things I continue to keep up on as we discover how the universe works.

Often, I’m not sure you understanding me at all. The “it” I was referring to was your own point, the one you came here to make, about “infinitude” or “reality” or whatever it is. How could that mean more to me than to you? At some point, we’ll move on, and I’ll forget about you. Unless of course you convince me this is something important.

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That part which a creation of the mind. Anil Seth calls it a “controlled hallucination”, a best guess by the brain of what all the incoming sensory data means as compared to what the brain believes it knows from experience.

Please do not think we are dismissing anything you say, but we are asking for clarification of what you mean by what you say in the context of “God’s Image”.

May I ask you to take a few minutes and watch this extraordinary lecture by Anil Seth, where he demonstrates the difficulty the brain has with creating an internal representation of reality, but also a remarkable demonstration of how easily the brain can adapt to new forms of information.

I myself have benefitted from the general message contained in this lecture and allowed me to see reality with a deeper appreciation of how the brain perceives reality.

It will be worth your while. I have looked at it at least 15 times and find new meaning to this condensed version of his much longer more formal lectures.

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Nope, no place left to go.

Appreciation the Human Mindscape ~ Physical Reality divide

With its inevitable conclusion that
the cosmos created our Earth,
and Earth created us,
and we created our “Gods”
and it is good!

It’s the denial and inability to be self-skeptical and learn from personal mistakes, that screw up the whole game.

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The thing is I don’t disagree with your processes. I’m simply pointing to the superset of which they are the subset.

I am curious though if I had never used the term “God”…simply stuck with Entirety would you have understood what I meant from the beginning?

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I will make time for the video because I like that sort of thing too. But I still beg any one of you on this forum to recognize the simple fact…Reality is all phenomena and the potential for phenomena. Our ideas and perceptions about “reality” are not actually something separate from Reality. If you have another word that accommodates the absolute context I’m referring to, please let me know what it is so we can move on.

(until then I will continue to improvise with “Reality-as-it-actually-is”)

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Turns out that I have seen it. (probably at your prompting) Good stuff and then when Youtube provided other things to watch there were several Non-duality related ones. I had a look at this one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZ0YFoUcY0s

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I don’t think so. I’ve looked into a wide variety of traditions, so I know there are many words for the same thing. And, I’m still not sure I understand what you mean, so I can’t really answer that. I think you mean the same thing all those other traditions mean, but when I say that, you don’t agree.

One thought I had overnight is, doesn’t this “entirety” include Newton’s laws of nature, and Einstein’s update, and the competing theories of quantum physics? That’s the world I was born into, the one that shaped my views. I never had to look at the sky and wonder what those dots were because I had seen telescopic images and was given the data that told me some of them were distant galaxies, and the ones that move differently, those are planets.

You call this a subset. I guess it is in the sense that I, or anyone, don’t know everything. I know that my senses don’t perceive the totality of reality, and our instruments and equations can only predict what that reality might be. The best minds on the subject say that it’s possible we may never know, that we may never observe or even completely model these other theoretical dimensions. But I think there is a consistent reality, and we can discover parts of it.

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lausten - "You call this a subset. I guess it is in the sense that I, or anyone, don’t know everything. I know that my senses don’t perceive the totality of reality, and our instruments and equations can only predict what that reality might be. The best minds on the subject say that it’s possible we may never know, that we may never observe or even completely model these other theoretical dimensions. But I think there is a consistent reality, and we can discover parts of it."

But why do you always put yourself (or by proxy, “the best minds”) in front of what most surely is Reality on its own? You stubbornly make it all about “what is known and unknown” when the bigger picture includes what we perceive AND what we don’t. We and our perceptions are subsets, as much as the stars and galaxies are subsets of Reality. Past and present are subsets, none of it more or less definitive of the Truth that IS the existential singularity of Reality (i.e. non-relative infinitude)

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That was understandable.

I don’t put myself in any particular order in the universe. That’s an ancient Greek notion. I prefer the Buddhist idea of oneness, and I can match that to the interconnectedness of nature, from my breath, to the atoms that make up my body.

When I say “best minds”, I’m speaking of the subset “minds”, meaning the physical ones. I don’t think that’s stubborn, it’s just the thing that I know that produces ideas and communicates them. I could philosophize about minds the size of planets, or some mind of the universe, but I wouldn’t know what those minds think. Knowledge comes from perception, so there’s some distinction there that you have that I don’t. I already said there is a limit to what we know or perceive, so it seems we agree on that.

Other than that, you don’t seem to have any more insight into what the infinitude is than anyone else. I hear you saying we should look to it, draw close to it, focus our attention on it, but that sounds exactly like prayer. When someone tells me to go pray about it, then I come back and say I didn’t gather anything from the prayer, they just tell me I did it wrong, and to go “pray harder”. No one has ever revealed a truth from that sort of meditation that could not be drawn from any other sort of reflection that comes from being alive and aware.

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lausten - "Other than that, you don’t seem to have any more insight into what the infinitude is than anyone else. I hear you saying we should look to it, draw close to it, focus our attention on it, but that sounds exactly like prayer. When someone tells me to go pray about it, then I come back and say I didn’t gather anything from the prayer, they just tell me I did it wrong, and to go “pray harder”. No one has ever revealed a truth from that sort of meditation that could not be drawn from any other sort of reflection that comes from being alive and aware."

All I’m trying to make happen is for you to acknowledge the significance of the context. But you can’t as you’ve now demonstrated, due to policy issues related to your beliefs. And please don’t try and tell me you don’t have any, just re-read what you wrote.

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I don’t think I ever said I don’t have beliefs. I have to believe quite a bit to get myself out of bed in the morning. I setup coffee at night believing the sun will come up in the morning. Gravity is a theory, I believe the floor will be there. I believe my wife loves me. I believe granola is better than Froot Loops. That’s just before breakfast.

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lausten - "I don’t think I ever said I don’t have beliefs. I have to believe quite a bit to get myself out of bed in the morning. I setup coffee at night believing the sun will come up in the morning. Gravity is a theory, I believe the floor will be there. I believe my wife loves me. I believe granola is better than Froot Loops. That’s just before breakfast."

Then put your own word on what I’ve been pointing to and let’s be done with it.

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I found what I think is your first post, "112. I don’t know what’s unbounded or permeates entirely, so I don’t have a word for those. The things I know can be found in books, including poetry. Sometimes the words don’t match the feelings. That’s all I got.

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"I found what I think is your first post, "112. I don’t know what’s unbounded or permeates entirely, so I don’t have a word for those. The things I know can be found in books, including poetry. Sometimes the words don’t match the feelings. That’s all I got."

And yet it holds up for me. (well said, and I’m happy to have had a hand in saying it)

What about non-relative infinitude (i.e. absolute singularity) doesn’t indicate unbounded to you?

I think you should just let this go. Nothing about it inspires you, or you are being political (aka dishonest). Either way you should find other things to talk about with somebody else.

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I’m not being political. That would be really weird.

It’s funny to me that you think I should be trying harder or something, or there’s something wrong with me because I don’t agree with you.

261

Probably not. Although, how does your “God” differ from “Entirety”?
… and if it doesn’t,
what’s the point of making a big deal out of “God”?

Did I write ‘separate’? No.
I deliberately use “~” and “divide” because they get closest to the idea. It’s like, I wouldn’t say the head of a coin is separate from the tail of a coin.

That doesn’t make sense. Potential isn’t a phenomena, it’s more like possibilities, perhaps promises. For instance the mind doesn’t create anything, it required two hands and a body for humans to implement their ideas into reality.

What are these “Potentials” you speak of?
Does potential create reality?
Or does reality give rise to potentials?

If something never happened, how can that have any claim on reality?

In reality the arrow of time moves in only one direction.

Even if, in the world of mathematical and philosophical potentials, one can do any damned thing with “time” one’s imagination can think of.

Well? Physical Reality.
Since that does specify that we are talking about the world of stuff and the natural laws that bind them.
Beyond that is the world of meta-physics. Which is not physical reality.

All consciousness is on an entirely different level, be it our human consciousness, or the consciousness of other creatures, as we navigate our respective worlds.

Consciousness is the produce of our body processing information (in steps Seth), or as Dr. Solms so lucidly describes it, our consciousness is the inside reflection of our body dealing itself, its environment and living.

Like the energy produced by a dynamo,
the flow of life’s energy and the flow of consciousness is directly dependent upon the condition and configuration of the biological dynamo producing it.

And when that dynamo stops or dies the flow of energy stops.

Nothing too complicated or speculative about it.

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citizenschallengev4 - "Well? Physical Reality. Since that does specify that we are talking about **the world of stuff and the natural laws that bind them** . Beyond that is the world of meta-physics. Which is not physical reality.

All consciousness is on an entirely different level, be it our human consciousness, or the consciousness of other creatures, as we navigate our respective worlds."

Now try not putting yourself, and your conceptual framework at the center of the Universe.

I mean really!?..what is wrong with all you hyper intellectuals on this forum?

All I’ve been keeping on the table is the the context of non-relative infinitude. Keep me in mind if it ever dawns on you what it implies, I’d be happy to get on with the conversation that hasn’t happened yet.