Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

Quote:vulcanlogician said:
Ah, man. You had some great thoughts, but you ended with an erroneous assumption.
Question?: Is God some kind of acronym for you? What does G-O-D stand for?
So, I really liked this thought. There really is something paradoxical about reality or the fact that "anything at all" exists.
But I take issue with the claim that God is "believed by atheists to be contained outside of the paradox of reality." I don't think this phrase means exactly "possibly or probably nonexistent" Most atheists think that God is "possibly or probably nonexistent." By implying that they in some way place God outside of reality, you are (possibly) misrepresenting atheism, which would be a strawman.

Perhaps I am misrepresenting the more "agnostic" group of opened-to-the-possibility of believing-in-reality "atheists", which in this case would simply not mind being called "agnostics".

Quote:vulcanlogician said:
Care to elaborate? And feel free to correct me at any point where I might have misinterpreted you.

The material universe cannot be independent of consciousness or the mind otherwise it would be "unreal". Thus unreality is non-informational and thus non-observational. It is nothing. And it has no relationship or connection to the spacetime manifold in which the universe can be real. The unreal universe is non-relational to the real universe and cannot exist, so it does not exist. There can be no external reality to a conscious observer and observation. Communication is the means of building an objectifiable reality in which our conscious brain can explain.

Physical matter exists within the reality of the mind and the communication between individuals. The mind is not an object. It is the reality.

(Sorry about the exceeding genius of that last statement. I was ^ when I wrote in back in the day.)

There is no other reality other than what the mind shows us. It is illusion and reality at the same time. The illusion is that reality is discreet and independent of consciousness. The reality is that is all experiencable directly by consciousness.

Personally I'm fairly sure the Universe existed in pretty much the same form for billions of years before we were there to see it and will carry on in much the same way long after we are gone. I am well pleased with the delightful, enchanting Universe I see - but I don't think it takes any notice of whether or not I am there to observe it. My importance in a Universe I didn't create is zero. Perhaps that explains the appeal of creating your own Universe in which you are 'The Creator'.

(Aug 25, 2023 12:18 AM)confused2 Wrote: [ -> ]Personally I'm fairly sure the Universe existed in pretty much the same form for billions of years before we were there to see it and will carry on in much the same way long after we are gone. I am well pleased with the delightful, enchanting Universe I see - but I don't think it takes any notice of whether or not I am there to observe it. My importance in a Universe I didn't create is zero. Perhaps that explains the appeal of creating your own Universe in which you are 'The Creator'.

So we don’t see the true reality. We’re just a life form and perhaps it’s way to complex a wave of information for our little brains to see what’s really out there. Look at it like another barrier, can’t go faster than light and can’t see the whole yet we go fast enough and see we’ll enough to survive. We simply cannot see reality if there is such a thing because of the same reason we can’t go faster than light, we’re not built for it.

Henri Poincare: A reality completely independent of the mind which conceives it, sees or feels it, is an impossibility. A world as exterior as that, even if it existed, would for us be forever inaccessible. But what we call objective reality is, in the last analysis, what is common to many thinking beings, and could be common to us all; this common part, we shall see, can only be the harmony expressed by mathematical laws. It is this harmony then which is the sole objective reality, the only truth we can obtain.

Human minds (brains) feature the same "operating system" -- they produce the same empirical (perceived) reality, except for some individuals that suffer from clinical conditions or are hallucinatory drug-users. So that shared template still provides an objective-like environment via inter-subjective agreement or consensus, that behaves independently of any single mind (brain). If you could time-travel millions of years into the past, then your mind (brain) would certainly also be generating images, sounds, odors, and so-forth from the information input of that era.

A transcendent or meta-empirical version of the world is actually superfluous, anyway, due to no way to access and confirm it in the raw. Material existence at large is "non-conscious" -- beliefs like panpsychism or the cosmos being a mind itself with a non-relational or absolute slash objective God's eye-view of its existence doesn't apply in strict or non-corrupted materialism. (The latter is actually wandering off into monistic idealism, immaterialism, or some form of universal mentalism.)

So if one eliminates the representations of consciousness (as happens after death), then everything disappears (both personal thoughts and the sensory appearances of the world). Absence of consciousness is absence of everything. Even if the universe was completely lifeless, but one of its planets was somehow manifesting itself in a non-psychological manner, then without a mind's functioning memory-based cognitive system there would still be no way to validate, identify, and understand that _X_ planet actually was present or existing as a non-mental version of "feeling" or a picture-like display of itself.  

Accordingly, a transcendent or meta-empirical version of the world cannot be apprehended except by unverifiable speculations and inferences, kind of akin to people guessing what is inside a box, but never being able to open the box to confirm anything. And while materialist or scientism dogma does get a free pass in the academic world, what it yields (once again) is the sterile situation above where is existence is blank without the representations of a mind (brain).

Another slightly deviated example: Secular people existing in a simulation might deem it practical to posit that the regularities of their on-screen environment reside inside a computer, similar to religious simulated people who believe what they perceive is maintained by God. But neither of those "practical" beliefs can be proven. Even if an avatar of the computer or an avatar of God appeared within their simulation and revealed the "truth" to them, they would still be stuck with having to believe what that "supernatural" mediator claimed rather than witnessing the "supernatural" information source for their perceptions directly.