American issues of Christianity, cosmology, politics, ecosphere, philosophy, contemporary history etc
12/2/24
Thinking About A.I.
11/30/24
The Many and The One
11/29/24
The Square of Opposition and Apophatic Theology
True Belief is Knowledge
Maybe the kernel of the issue is; can anyone ever have absolute certainty? Probably not. That would be a belief (of absolute certainty)…wait a minute- cogito ergo sum. True belief does require verification.
Human makes speculative formula about supernatural. If x then not x because x equals not x.; find the value of x. Maybe that’s a wrong expression so I’ll try again.
Human makes proposition about supernatural or undefined literal term and factors (rewrites) the expression. The simplification of the proposition is less difficult than multiplying the irrational numbers by half of the value of natural numbers, yet more difficult than deciding if eleatic paradox prime numbers are beyond good or evil. The product is for human consumption as they factor out God from equation and sleep better knowing calculations are perfect and convincing. A is necessarily B because C follows B and A follows C. If that isn’t persuasive enough then…
AI Directing itself to Evolve in Mountains Ranges and Planets
Non-sentient self-reproducing programming that is AI embedded in nature by advanced human intelligence-there is no telling what it might do. Imagine of rocks could morph themselves instantly into whatever the AI mountain ranges permeating them wanted to do. I suppose that’s something possible in a few dozen years. Might lead to wild changes if AI expropriated entire planets for themselves to be and become synthetic a priori thought as in sentient material substance.
11/23/24
Christian and Secular Government misc
Regarding use of nukes in 1945: it wasn’t my choice. As with the impending Third World War, I would have tried different approaches to international relations that didn’t culminate in war. Pres Truman was elected by voters that didn't want more constituents to die if it wasn't necessary. Obviously I wasn’t involved then nor in the Vietnam conflict in making political decisions. Far beyond my social mileau. A post prompted me to reflect on the relationship between the sacred and the profane. Bill Clinton led the profane government for example rather than the sacred.
Augustine wrote about the City of God vs the city of Man. People often. They don't understand the circumstance of man with original sin that last throughout life...it's problematic in a thermodynamics field, and forgiveness of sin by the sacrifice of Jesus. The sin of Christians is covered by the shed blood of Jesus so God doesn't see it, yet while in the world Christians remain human and there is a conflict between the sacred and the profane where all humanity coheres. The profane don't have that conflict if unsaved. Presidents and other leaders revert to normal human conduct common to history when pressed, if they are even saved. The world always needs someone to blame... that's s.o.p. Finding Godly leaders to bring the world to Christ and his ethics when most of the world is lost isn't as easy as training a lion to be a vegetarian
Jesus said that in heaven people neither marry or are given in marriage. What is male and female except for sexual differences of beings for reproduction in a thermodynamics field? An eternal being, God isn’t likely to have a gender. He is in his own class; sui generis, Spirit. Jesus called him Father, and himself The Son. That is a relationship humans do not fully know. It’s easier to learn why gravity was the first force to go its own way after inflation.
Individuals are saved by Christ. All humans are subject to thermodynamics and all that means from energy input to procreation, greed, desire etc Corrupt or misunderstanding Christian leaders can support select secular government actions like war on occasion yet they are far better off simply doing what Jesus instructed in the Bible.
There has been a lot of political tragedy in the world. Secular governments with sovereignty in the west were nearly always independent of Christian leaders. Even the crusades were fought by kings not under direct subordination to a Pope or Protestant leaders.
Was Pope Gregory right in motivating the crusades? He was not a general or ruler of nations that heeded his call. The crusades were a reaction to Muslim invasions of Europe on three fronts. Christians believe God can use secular governments to work his will yet like the free will debate no one can understand the criterion exhaustively.
Secular government leaders are glad to draw in anything that will bring them support. They haven’t over history required urging to increase political power, expand the realm or increase wealth.
God may try to improve the quality of secular governments over time evolving them in accord with a purpose.
King Leopold wasn’t a priest. Neither were Democrat Presidents Tuman, LBJ and Biden. Incidentally some say the Japanese nukes incentivized the Soviets not to continue west in 1945 to capture what Hitler lost. It was a tragic use of technology obviously. It spared 250 thousand US casualties invading Japan and possibly more in Europe. Entirely secular.
Individuals saved by Christ try to follow His way. Results on Earth may vary, though the grace of God moves them forward with eternal life transcending physical death. It isn’t about money though. Matthew 19:24 “And again I say unto you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God.”
11/22/24
All Life is Capitalist
Woke and Truth Theory
Axiology and other views need be subjectively held. That is one’s opinion is subjective. Truth theories too have a subjective metaphysical essence. The disquotation theory of truth is pragmatic. I would guess that woke is a package of political preferences more than a philosophical outlook, though the later may exist in an unrooted kind of way.
Does one need purple hair to be woke, and what about the challenges for people with significant hair loss? Maybe in accepting Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil Paradigm it should be remembered that Nietzsche may have been boosted there by an advanced stage of syphilis causing dementia.
There may be different categories of truth references. Disquotation theory can point to God as Truth in itself for example within a language list without disquotation theory being the same kind of truth.
Society requires objective rules to function well. So many people require traffic signals-even the woke, to go about their business and reduce unintended collisions. Civil governance is required regardless of one’s opinion on truth theory. Democracy has an implicit pragmatic operating system that cannot withstand its abandonment for the notion that truth is subjective.
Einstein’s wild hair and relativity theory may have stimulated a cascade of woke emulators. I believe that Einstein on truth theory might have opted in for an objective basis for space-time and said that human statements about it can be true or false.11/21/24
About Logic
Morality
11/20/24
Some Wonder About Shi'ism
Innate Knowledge of God?
Phenomenalism and Realism
Quine said he was a physicalist once when asked. Yet he’s also a realist concerning math. I believe people are entanglements in the Higgs field as is all matter. There isn’t anything unless it’s spirit that would outlast the structural change of the field…maybe not even information.
Eventually, like one of those disappearing knots everything returns to two dimension massless waves with probabilities of being somewhere and that may become just space and nothing.
Once after an abcessed tooth developed I discovered that eating chocolate would make me lose balance and I would slowly fall to the ground tilting left with my mind seeming to break apart into quarters. It was a terrible experience that would go away when my head was on the ground.
That made me aware of the phenomenal temporality of mind. I went to an orthodontist and got the tooth pulled. The experience disappeared yet I remember.
In late October 2018 I took a 13 foot boat south from Juneau 160 miles with a 2.5hp outboard. Wind and waves came up in Stephens Passage/Taku Inlet and I had to basically surf the vessel across crests and trough side seas for an hour until nearing Slocum Inlet. I prayed all the way across. It was phenomenal. One error and the boat capsizes in cold water, yet it worked out dry. That too made existence seem more phenomenal, comparing analogously a ram entangled in a bush to life entangled in the Higgs Field.
So I have faith in God yet still have interest in ‘reality’ and its nature. Having read Plato as my first philosophy I regard the realm of forms as a kind of template for quanta so far as humans can consider it. I tend to leave the location of data storage for blueprints with God for I have no idea where actual abstract universals would be physically stored in this Universe.
Husserl wrote 'Logical Investigations'. A tome on philosophy as rigorous science. I am not sure that he achieved proving the point. He did create phenomenology though. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Husserl
Is Money Necessary for a Philosopher
Mexican Loss of the West
Biden Intent Seems to be an Upgrade to N.A.T.O. War vs. Russia
Ukraine has begun using American and English missiles to attack Russia. The President appears to intend to provoke Russia to retaliate against England and the U.S.A. in order to bring N.A.T.O. into the war. I repeat that the President seems incompetent in his job performance or is totally sold out to a Ukraine first policy.
Seemingly he has no wish to allow the President-elects peace plan to end the conflict to have a chance of seeing the light of day.
11/19/24
Noah's Flood May Have Happened with Climate Change
Reason and Emotion
Do Humans Have Innate Knowledge of God?
Chomsky and Everett’ debated over the question of grammer being innate for humans and didn’t have a decisive outcome.
Maybe it was surpassed by an emergent paradigm. It did at least have few complex concepts strung together in support of unobservable points although one could certainly create various tests for humans and apes.
The way humans apprehend and appearance of God in any form including communication is entirely live and up to God. He has communicated with individuals in different ways history recounts. The book of Jeremiah has a passage where God said that everyone will know him: 31-34″And they shall teach no more every man his neighbor and every man his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord.’ For they shall all know Me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them,” saith the Lord, “for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”
In Jeremiah where God said that his people had forgotten him, that probably meant they had fallen away from a right relationship and worship. 15″15 Because My people hath forgotten Me, they have burned incense to vanity; and they have caused them to stumble in their ways from the ancient paths, to walk in paths, on a road not cast up,”. Human knowledge is imperfect and concerns temporal and phenomenal.
One might argue comparably that humans have no innate knowledge of morality or the differences between good and evil. Strong opinions exist on each side.
Some might wonder if humans have an innate sense of the passage of time or if it is simply biological challenges that press that are the real time experience. Then scientist theorize that time be an apparent phenomenon of quantum entanglement and might not really exist. More options on shifting sand.
https://www.thebrighterside.news/discoveries/time-may-be-an-illusion-new-study-finds/
It is more reasonable to start with monism rather than pluralism in the beginning. Algorithms and other parts are pluralistic. If the Universe was initially an existing slum- say, a huge war had left it in bits and pieces, something great might have been built from misc algorithms that whirred and hummed efficiently. The Triune God notably avoids the Monism/Pluralism duality through being one yet three simultaneously. Information of everything possible is reducible to less than zero dimensions at singularity for omniscience in-itself.
Mind, Matter and Analytic Philosophy
Is there an abstract world such as exists in imagination or a Platonic realm of ideas? Alternatively a tie coat.might exist in language to cover the world with solar voltaic paint metaphorically speaking. The point where mind and conscious, abstract thought merges with matter would be insensible and non- sentient. Sentience in the border would discontinue. Quine”s analytic approach is still valid regarding epistemology paradigmata. People do perceive matter in their own way. Matter fir-itself is probably completely dark.
There are some vicious attacks on Analytic Philosophy. I found a reference to APS- the immune syndrome attacks healthy cells. Ad hominems do that; lysergic attacks. Analytic philosophy isn’t psychotic. Ayer should have thought of that as a defense for empiricism. Quine’s reasoning seemed correct on language to me. Ontological relativity and other essays was a great collection. Maybe from the Tarner lectures. The meanings of words have nominal values with use and can evolve or disappear rather than last forever in a realist sense. Kripke had a neo-realist opinion that was reasonable too. Neither were the least psychotic.
Bringing naturalist epistemology into the discussion was helpful. Apparently Quine is credited with inventing the term I need to read more on that subject and discovered much material. I tend to view the human experience as one of existing within quantum fields providing sensations for sentients composed in them. https://iep.utm.edu/nat-epis/
Quine’s point of view is based on logical analysis of language and ideas about it including the concepts made with language about ‘reality’. I agree that after invalidating empiricism it just left matters there instead of providing a replacement model. Ideas arise in mind rather than in sensations though sensations may prompt ideas
Charles Sanders Pierce invented pragmatism. C.S. (pronounced purse). He had an interesting life and was fired from a teaching job at Johns Hopkins for marrying a Romani.
There is use of Pierce's scientific method criteria in contemporary applications in programming and tech
People have commented it is similar to the OODA loop.
On mind Pierce considered ideas to form in a trielectical evolution psychologically.
Perhaps he was influenced by Hegel- that isn't likely though.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce/#:~:text=So%2C%20as%20it%20turns%20out,greatest%20lower%20bound)%20in%20C.
He ended up living "in near penury". I wonder if the Quine-Putnam 'indispensability argument to categorize math as realist is an example of pragmatic reasoning.
Imperfect Character is Universal
The question of why anything exists rather than nothing was a question that Plotinus considered in The Enneads. Why would The One order anyt...
-
Here and there pointillist continua build rowing the skiff clambering over the road staying in shadows until spring insouciant compact snow ...
-
Alaskan officials have cut down or banned King Salmon fishing in much of Alaska because so few of the large fish are returning. The Ancho...
-
Why do F-22 pilots lose consciousness and let their planes crash and burn? The air superiority fighters are designed to survive oppositio...