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Spinoza’s God: Einstein believed in it, but what was it?

prospectmagazine.co.uk

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Re: Spinoza’s God: Einstein believed in it, but what was it?

#71

Post by ImprobableTruth »

badinfo wrote: post #28
ImprobableTruth wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How could you possibly deny the existence of your subjective experience? This is just utterly incomprehensible to me.

What's the philosophical difference between your subjective experience of existence and a 90s-style power-on-self-test? "I am on. I can tell that I am on. I dunno what I think once I am off." Same could be said of man, machine, consciousness, whatever. What's incomprehensible is the baseless belief that consciousness is some special state of existence unique to balding, violent apes floating around a wet rock, anthro…

Huh? Subjective experience is about whether the machine experiences the power-on-self-test, not about what it emits externally. Animals, machines or even rocks might all be conscious, but we simply don't know because it's impossible to ascertain through external means.

>What's incomprehensible is the baseless belief that consciousness is some special state of existence unique to balding, violent apes floating around a wet rock, anthropomorphizing all the crap around them just to make themselves feel special.

What a ridiculous strawman.

Re: Spinoza’s God: Einstein believed in it, but what was it?

#72

Post by aetherspawn »

seiferteric wrote: post #63
aetherspawn wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who created God? Good question. I did some digging and found this article, that reasons using references from a Christian point of view: https://www.jw.org/en/library/magazines/wp20140801/who-made-... Is is clear in the Bible that God does not exist in physical form. In the heavens, according to the Bible, he does not even exist in the same form as angels. At one time, Jesus was described in his human form, as "a lit…

I can imagine a block universe with time as just an axis. Then our universe can be just an object sitting on god’s table. But ultimately this still does not provide any answers.

To get more answers (not necessarily 'any' though - I think you may have overgeneralized there), we would need to understand this mode of existence. I am thinking like this: what does existence look like without time? For example, a table is of no use to someone who has no timescale to do anything at that table. The word "created", is even more curious, as it has no meaning. Like a painting, in a plane like this, everything "just is". Immutable. Confusing to me. I'll admit, I'll never understand the full meaning of something that exists outside time.

Perhaps this is why God would make a universe with time.

Re: Spinoza’s God: Einstein believed in it, but what was it?

#73

Post by Koshkin »

murat124 wrote: post #60
foxhop wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your body wouldn't function without the loving cooperative cells, all parts, all working to make you, a perfect for this current space time human! Same is true about society, we will rebuild and pivot into a stronger more distributed form, if we follow Truth, Love, And Freedom in our mandates.

That would be a great EPIC: Follow Truth, Love, And Freedom, if only we had a consensus of what they mean.

But: Truth is ugly; Nature is scary; Life is meaningless; Faith is silly; there is no Hope; Love is creepy; Freedom is useless.

Re: Spinoza’s God: Einstein believed in it, but what was it?

#75

Post by foxhop »

murat124 wrote: post #60
foxhop wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your body wouldn't function without the loving cooperative cells, all parts, all working to make you, a perfect for this current space time human! Same is true about society, we will rebuild and pivot into a stronger more distributed form, if we follow Truth, Love, And Freedom in our mandates.

That would be a great EPIC: Follow Truth, Love, And Freedom, if only we had a consensus of what they mean.

I sort of tried to define them above I'm sure we can iterate. The Truth God is what is discussed in the article. Einstein believed in this God because it's a paradox to live a life in this universe with a consciousness and not understand there is universal god which all things take part of.

Our hearts beat for us out of loving cooperation.

Re: Spinoza’s God: Einstein believed in it, but what was it?

#76

Post by tasty_freeze »

forgotmypw17 wrote: post #3

Every moment of our existence brings about a certain amount of suffering, and a certain amount of joy. Depending on our choices and intentions, the amounts of joy and suffering for both us and other viewpoints varies. I believe that Universe is continuously solving for the maximum sum amount of joy from all the viewpoints combined. Of course, a certain amount of suffering is required to bring about the joy, whether b…

The spider thinks things are going great up until the shoe comes down and crushes him.

The universe is old and huge on a human time scale. But (and I'm making up the numbers for effect) 99.999999% of the universe is devoid of joy and should you find yourself in other than that 0.000001% of the life-friendly places, you will be snuffed out without concern. As for the time scale, it is estimated it will take 10E100 years for all the black holes to eventually evaporate, leading to the final heat death of the universe. Life will have a home anywhere in the universe for an exceedingly small fraction of that time.

Re: Spinoza’s God: Einstein believed in it, but what was it?

#77

Post by tasty_freeze »

brutusborn wrote: post #36
lalaland1125 wrote: post #13

It seems like the main purpose of Spinoza's God is to have an unfalsifiable God. The problem with other Gods like the Christian God is that they tend to come with requirements about the world that are easy to disprove. For example, the Christian God is not very compatible with the existence of natural evil. By removing all of those implications and other attributes, you arrive a Spinoza's God, a God so vague / powerl…

Aren't all gods unfalsifiable? And I'd be interested in reasoning behind the God-natural evil argument? I imagine a few Christian Theologians have found a way around it by now.

> Aren't all gods unfalsifiable?

No, that is exactly counter to the point the person you were replying to was making. Amorphous, fluffy definitions of god can be unfalsifiable. But if you declare detailed attributes of your god, they can be in contradiction and thus the claims about that god are falsifiable.

But in practice, people are terrific at rationalizing and will overlook all those contradiction and continue to believe their god is the right one.

Re: Spinoza’s God: Einstein believed in it, but what was it?

#78

Post by ImprobableTruth »

jagrsw wrote: post #48
ImprobableTruth wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How could you possibly deny the existence of your subjective experience? This is just utterly incomprehensible to me.

Eg. by the power of the Boltzmann Brain argument. In short, if Universe will exist forever (no matter its heat death, the Boltzmann Brain also works under those conditions), then all configurations of matter (locally) will appear over its "lifetime" infinitely many times. Consequently, you with your subjective experience and memories could have been created a picosecond ago by "random" motions of matter, without the…

If I'm actually a Boltzmann Brain, all my memories are a lie and I just exist for a picosecond, then Boltzmann Brains can experience subjective experiences, so what?

>This also means that 'cogito ergo sum' is too strong of a statement. Just saying "something exists" (as in, "why there's something rather than nothing") seems sufficient.

How do you know that something exists?

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