On Free Will

 Sometimes one is compelled to be conscientiously free as thousands of choices need be made continuously for-oneself. It is a hard thing to say, for example, that one is not free taking a small skiff miles through wind, cold water and large waves from variable directions  Sometimes one survives because one is free rather than an automaton wondering if one has free will.

Each of thousands of free will decisions are then not actual decisions because there is a meta-decision negating the choices in a post hoc ergo propter hoc sort of way?

Each of those ‘contingent’ decision are reactions to emergent challenges of waves and wind.

Choices must be made that are the best among dozens of possible courses to take in response to the waves and position of the skiff and each of those choices are made with self-aware free will.

The choices are not made by the general present motivation of survival. Survival compels decisions to be made yet does not make them itself Instead they are specific decisions not made by an overall survival requisite although that is a present motivation.

Best choices are made by evaluating options among potential courses logically, instantaneously for hours.

Though one strengthens legs it is free will that chooses how to use them. Post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacies are common misunderstandings… after this therefore because of this.

Legs enable one to walk, or ride a bike, make karate kicks or climb Mt Everest yet they do not compel one to do so.

Regard politicians that don’t believe in free will and further that their minds don’t really exist except as delusions so 37 trillion dollars of public debt is only an illusion too.

Thought isn’t something like a feedback loop with inflexible conditioned beliefs about percepts and the complete complex of compresence such that ratiocination is impotent and controlled deterministically. I am surprised that people would like to believe the subconscious makes all of the decisions and that intentional and extensional thought in consciousness are non sequiturs.

For those that believe in evolution or God they should not wager that God or evolution has made a self-deluding mind for humanity. Quite the opposite; a humans mind is the tip of the spear of reason seeking to realize itself in history. Conscious thought is sharply presented to comprehend mind and its place in nature. And for believers God said early on that humanity had become like little gods after eating of the tree of knowledge. Humanity my find ways to dumb themselves down, yet that’s not a good idea at all.

A society where many people hold such irresponsible beliefs probably would be doomed to fail since the populous believe their intentional thought is incompetent, irrelevant and immaterial. A political party of such would be like Democrats without even trying.

Some would vigorously defend the proposition that mankind doesn’t have free will. Slaves don’t have free will in a political sense yet may be free in a Christian context of free will with The Lord Jesus even so.

Some mean that human thought is not free and is entirely deterministic. I believe that was B.F. Skinner’s opinion in behaviorism. They tend to regard conscious volition as presenting an illusion of free will. Dictatorships would love the masses to believe they have no will of their own and only a dictator- a Leviathan has free will in a Superman paradigm ala Nietzsche.

The need to defend against free will moral, political and social self-determination tends to run strong through the Democrat Party.

Post-modernism did lead to a compilation of skepticism and moral relativism in various elites while some of the urban masses packed into the feelies social environment of Huxley were willing to dispense of their will and even mind with dope to love the one their with in a physicalist sense, with an ecstasy pacifier hanging round their neck and a little silver coke spoon in a pocket. They hated the idea of sin existing to disturb their dogmatic slumber.

Philosophy is not about ad hominems. Rational discussions cannot be advanced with personal attacks. Political philosophy does not require that one switch to political ad hominem mode. The consequences of a political party that has advanced post modernist moral relativist positions going so far as to say that truth is completely subjective and applies that sort of outlook to the national political system can have devastating practical consequences.

Philosophy is not about ad hominems. Rational discussions cannot be advanced with personal attacks. Political philosophy does not require that one switch to political ad hominem mode. So you accept that free will does exist. Good. That is the point of the OP- to confirm or deny the point. The consequences of a political party that has advanced post modernist moral relativist positions going so far as to say that truth is completely subjective and applies that sort of outlook to the national political system can have devastating practical consequences.

The competition for political power is strong. Those that have no concern about reality in politics and only about subjective concerns like abortion, homosexuality and legal dope disregard real economic challenges and other interests that should be of concern for a democracy. Democrat politicians seem to be concerned mostly with enriching themselves. That party forgot largely about environmentalism and peace the past four years. There were thousands of ways to get the environmental bill passed while Democrats had both houses of congress if they actually cared about the external world. Democrats did not protest the Ukraine war or find a way to settle that land dispute nor even express an interest in doing so. The default from the abandonment of reality in politics leads to plutocracy or worse. I am a political independent and support quality ideas for political planks in the real world. The inward subjectivism of atheist, hedonist post modernism seems to drive people away from concerns about the real empirical world where everyone exists. That is one of the reasons why I am unhappy with that trend since it leaves politics to the rich since they are concerned about reality. Democracy in the blind trust of the rich doesn’t make for a great country, yet it is better than just letting it fall apart going to seed.

Ideas Some People Care About

 Some beliefs may cause actions that harm others. Politics has many ideas that can harm society as does criminality.

People are free to think whatever they want although the ideas may be harmful to themselves.

Consider terrorists that think the USA should be destroyed, or people that believe humanity is a parasite and should be eradicated, or politicians that don’t believe in free will so their minds don’t really exist except as delusions so 37 trillion dollars of public debt is only an illusion too. People care about such ideas.

A Reply to an Attestation of Doom

 The controversion of Adam and Eve as real people because of evolution theory began with a certitude regarding who and when Adam and Eve were and that for some unexplained reason, states they didn’t exist because evolution theory was created by Charles Darwin. So many unreflective atheists with superficial knowledge of the Bible assume its content is simplistic like their understanding of it.

Adam is from the same root word in Hebrew as dirt. Man evolved from dirt at the hand of God in one sense. Yet Adam and Eve may have been the first humans to discern the difference between good and evil or right and wrong. Animals and prior hominids did not have that capability. God noticed the change in the garden of Eden that may have existed in Saudi Arabia during the Younger Dryas or a few thousand years before when even the Sahara was a grassland with large bodies of water.

There are other theories about Adam and Eve as well as Cain and Abel. Toynbee believed Cain was the first blacksmith and killing his brother who was a pasturalist was an historical reference to the evolution of society from herding nomads to settled life with metal working.

Some regard humanity as existing and Adam and Eve were outside of space-time and only cast out of the garden into the general population after stealing from or eating of the tree of knowledge. It says they were thrown into the temporal thermodynamic order in part to stop them from eating from the tree of eternal life.There are several possible ways to interpret what Genesis means because people don’t know what God’s purpose was in having it written. The linguistic values of Genesis are subject to what Wittgenstein called ‘the indeterminacy of translation’ since the exact material that went into its composition and origin of that material are not known, besides being attributed to God general through prophets, scribes and oral histories from thousands of years ago.

Yet since atheists feel better with a completely worldly explanation of creation and want to acquire themselves of original sin by negating the truth of the Bible on the foundation of their own badly informed and commonly ditto’d superficial ideas they plaster social media with incessant attacks. Besides feeling sorrow for the spiritually dead and lost faithless followers of nihilism or the devil or their own devices, i.m.o. Christians don’t regard the superficial attacks as more than attestations of doom.

One is a flowing process though the river remains the same, reaching a destination in the desert where it disappears into the ground. The water of life rebirths in spirit.

Secular Science and Prayer

 Prayer is a way of communicating with God. Some would seek a secular examination of its value. That would be comparable to explaining the value and purpose of a phone call without believing the call goes anywhere besides the mind of the user of the phone.

Is a Stable Base Required for Confirmation of a Truth Theory?

 If one falls from an aircraft door without a parachute and contemplates actions to take making a supposition that a parachute would evolve the situation positively, then sees a parachute trailing behind him, apprehends the chute to put it on and test his theory then the truth test occurs when he opens the chute though neither a stable base or a table base were present to enable the truth to be put on the table. Confirmation that the parachute was a true supposition was apprehended when it slowed the descent toward chtonic depths of 40 trillion dollars of public debt.

Synthetic Life and Gravity as a Self-Tightening Lock Nut

 A kind of asymmetry seems to exist in nature, chirility, that affects particle-anti particle pairs. Even in cellular micro-biology the phenomenon exists such that a handedness exists differentiating left from right. There are various rotational symmetry breaking relationships that could entangle mass to mass or even make a particle have no mass in select directions. That could be a reason why mass is self-tightening like a lock washer as it were.

https://www.datacamp.com/tutorial/eigenvectors-eigenvalues

Rotational asymmetries relating to particles of fields and or quantum superpositions and entanglement could ineluctably draw mass together.

Scientists are developing synthetic life and within a decade may create synthetic bacteria that, Nobel winning scientists advise, may end human life. It’s not intended to be a way to save on federal Medicare. 

Rotational asymmetries relating to particles of fields and or quantum superpositions and entanglement could ineluctably draw mass together.

Scientists are developing synthetic life and within a decade may create synthetic bacteria that, Nobel winning scientists advise, may end human life. It’s not intended to be a way to save on federal Medicare. 

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/creating-mirror-life-could-be-disastrous-scientists-warn/

God Allows 'Imperfect' Beings to Exist

 The question of why anything exists rather than nothing was a question that Plotinus considered in The Enneads. Why would The One order anything at all to exist, much less the Nous and Realm of Forms, since He is perfect and complete with the answer to every question part of His Being a priori. If it seems imperfect for anything to exist besides God, perhaps then it is a calculation, or an effect of internal thought processing. Maybe it is every possible quantum calculation being reflected as Universes. God queried Adam and Eve, found the consistently imperfect and placed them in a temporal containment algorithm just Jesus Christ could overcome.

If perfection requires omniscience and omnipotence, every possibility of being actualized with individuals believing they are free and self-reflective need be imperfect when actualized as they are apart from God. Human politics aren’t perfected. 

https://www.udio.com/songs/4LQNteQRiiSfLsQG6NUywH

If perfection requires omniscience and omnipotentence, every possibility of being actualized with individuals believing they are free and self-reflective need be imperfect when actualized as they are apart from God.

God is the sole perfect being and through the Son the elect are with God for eternity. Omniscience may be cognizant of every deviation from perfection, of every wrong answer as well as right and of the iterations leading to error. Though aware of the problem of evil He may have a trash file for broken and wicked will files that are inimical and counter-productive.

Maybe there is another answer, and like AI developers trying to put AI on laptops locally, the One continues development of humanity as a venture within infinite considerations.

https://youtu.be/_47JL0sLoFE?feature=shared

Building Large Salt-water Filled Irrigation Canals for Evaporation-Condensation Fresh Water On Mex Border is Better than a Fence

 Build large irrigation canals like the California Aqueduct along the Mexican border instead of useless expensive fences.  Fill one of two canals with Pacific Ocean water piped to the Continental Divide with solar power and fill one canal, with locks, and use solar energy to evaporate salt water and capture fresh water for farming.

Someone in DC must have a brain that works periodically, and when that happens border. Security canals for desalination should go ahead . There can be some fencing to protect the canal zone. Water could be sold to Mexico too since the desert there is fairly dry.

Do Humans See Real Objects?

 Photons bouncing off objects reach the optic nerve. The photons are not the things in themselves. Invisible man suits can also present images of things they aren’t.

People see representations of objects that reflect select wavelengths of light in a particular way. That reflectivity matrix is an attribute of an object rather than a thing itself; the phenomenal rather than noumena.

Congress Should Make a Law to Require that Undeclared War Funding Be Matched with Charitable Giving

 There needs to be a way to slow lunatic war monger Presidents from funding undeclared foreign wars. Requiring that war spend be equally matched with peace spending abroad would halt war mongers in their tracks. They are more callous and miserly than Scrooge Von Mortal Kombat. Congress should get that law for funding undeclared wars passed directly.

https://www.mercyships.org/wp-media/?form=FUNEBRTHNXN&gad_source=1

Keep life Natural as Possible

Transhumanism shouldn’t be a goal. A human body filters input in the universe for mind. Removing much of the body detaches some input into the body-brain-mind phenomena possibly devolving the conscious experience of being. If life is a spiritual proving ground and opportunity for salvation transitions away from natural being should be minimized; especially if there is a surfeit of naturals suffering the panoply of challenges of poverty.

With a human body being such a complex and wondrous blessing it is rash to willfully stray from the given human natural form and sin, or miss the mark of remaining the perfectly adapted form and choose theoretical gambling with life.

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 anything at all to exist, much less the Nous and Realm of Forms, since He is perfect and complete with the answer to every question part of His Being a priori. If it seems imperfect for anything to exist besides God, perhaps then it is a calculation, or an effect of internal thought processing. Maybe it is every possible quantum calculation being reflected as Universes. God queried Adam and Eve, found the consistently imperfect and placed them in a temporal containment algorithm just Jesus Christ could overcome.

If perfection requires omniscience and omnipotence, every possibility of being actualized with individuals believing they are free and self-reflective need be imperfect when actualized as they are apart from God. Human politics aren’t perfected. 

https://www.udio.com/songs/4m1WPoGGCBLvrHgAMudJfA

If perfection requires omniscience and omnipotentence, every possibility of being actualized with individuals believing they are free and self-reflective need be imperfect when actualized as they are apart from God.

God is the sole perfect being and through the Son the elect are with God for eternity. Omniscience may be cognizant of every deviation from perfection, of every wrong answer as well as right and of the iterations leading to error. Though aware of the problem of evil He may have a trash file for broken and wicked will files that are inimical and counter-productive.

Maybe there is another answer, and like AI developers trying to put AI on laptops locally, the One continues development of humanity as a venture within infinite considerations.
https://www.udio.com/songs/m2Ew6wpxksuzVEJ9dXTTju

Turkey Exerts Control of Syria While Biden Snoozes

Turkish fuhrer Erdogan is expanding Turkish poeer over Syrian regions while threatening Israel that has moved into Southern Lebanon. N.A.T.O. has this opened a two-front war of expansion on Eurasia, and President Biden just keeps sending weapons and cash to Ukraine.

The US should support an Israeli, Kurd, Druze alliance in the former Syria and send the 101st airborne to secure the Free State of Izkurdruze’s borders against Turkish invaders asap. Joe Biden should wake up and stop the Kurdish war monger

The Lock Nut of Concentrated Wealth in Capitalism

 Capitalism is a way that includes most people in America. A cash economy that has a price on everything. Poverty is the most grave social sin. Even the middle class and illegal immigrants may be derisive of poor Americans. It is inefficient in many ways, and wealth is assuredly over-concentrated in the U.S.A. to such an extent that Americans are on parity with Mexico now. People have written about the inability of the Earth to sustain so many people at the present levels of consumption for more than a half century, yet there is little ability politically for people to change the way things are. Ecological economics for sustainability would require smarter politicians than the U.S.A. elects. Capitalism is a self-tightening lock nut concentrating wealth because capital grows faster than wages.

Creating some kind of basic income so no one is mired for decades in poverty would be helpful in a compassionate conservatism sort of way yet ideologues are against that seeing it as communism or socialism. When wealth is overly concentrated stagnation sets in to an economy as fewer than 1% own the majority of everything in the corporate world. People are promoted as they are of value keeping the 1% wealth structure intact. Individuals like Jobs, Gates, Buffet and Musk were/are symbols of capitalism with good P.R. value. 

Entertainment people in the 1% of 1% comprise 5% of that group. They usually support the system with good P.R. value keeping the public from being politically restive or increasing taxes on the rich. Capital increases faster than wage labor so concentrated wealth is a self-tightening lock nut; one gets some sort of plutocracy running things.The media becomes controlled by the 1% and the public become bound to paying off public debt owned by the 1% and global elites who pay fewer taxes. Yet that situation reflects human nature, the bad side, where public commons go neglected and social insecurity compels greed in micro-economics lest one starve or freeze in the winter. Humans presently can’t really do much better.

It is possible that in the future some kind of technical progress will assure that everyone has a fairly comfortable experience of being alive on Earth and that resources from the other planets of the solar system will provide enough for people on Earth after having achieved a stable and sustainable population level globally. Maybe the planet will have some kind of basic income for all and capitalism will be limited at the high end in order to prevent overly concentrated wealth as a percent of national income and social capital.

The Biden-Harris administration and others never use the word poverty these days except as it applies to foreign countries. Spending a half trillion on the Ukraine war instead of developing water resources and sustainable agriculture in Africa was unthinkable yet that happened. Such changes over-all are decisive in the long run. One need invest wisely in peace, education and ecological sustainability instead of conflict yet even that simple prioritization is nearly impossible to achieve in U.S. politics.

A practical step to make earnings opportunities more egalitarian and to accelerate the pace of economic invention and progress would be to reform the patent system to limit the period of exclusive patent ownership to three years with 5% of sales royalties going to the patent holder from users of an invention after it goes public domain (in three years). Because the pharmaceutical industry requires so much time and capital investment to develop new drugs they might be treated somewhat differently and given exclusivity for 7 years after which 5% sales royalties would go to the patent holder as the drug reaches the public domain. There are a lot of inventors that cannot afford to participate in the patent process unable to gamble several thousand dollars on an idea. Thus ideas tend to trickle upward to concentrated wealth and that is bad for society especially in an era where ecosystem and species decline in quality and quantity are facts of life.

Scripture and Writing Misc History

 Deuteronomy 32:8-9 is “When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance,

when he divided all mankind,

he set up boundaries for the peoples

according to the number of the sons of Israel.[a]

9 For the Lord’s portion is his people,

Jacob his allotted inheritance”. That could be a reference to Jesus for Jacob was renamed Israel.

There is speculation that Avrm may have understood cuneiform as a scribe in Babylon. Moses knew hieroglyphics . Between the two there is a prospect that written material was carried forward.

I believe that Moses may have invented the aleph beth for he was well educated and had the time to do so. Oral histories were a parallel data mode merging eventually with writing. Scripture material as prophesied was gathered by King David into the Pentateuch. The J writer history is interesting. At some point during Solomon or Rehoboam’s court the material was collated.

It’s worth noting the destruction of Jerusalem as a religious center by the Babylonians during the Prophet Jeremiah’s day. Certainly Israelites were not always on the same page of devotion to God as one sees when the golden calf was poured in the wilderness. The Old Testament has so many warnings to Israel about being reprobate it need not be commented on.

https://archive.org/details/bookofj0000unse_f4f4

Degrees of Infinity and Unbelief

 It is comparable to flat Earthers I guess. People can’t believe that some infinities are greater than others. They dismiss the idea and say there is only one kind of infinity and that people worshiping math can’t see the wood for the pulp. One might rely to such incredulously…

People are worshiping math? That’s a startling development. Might have developed from those cardinal numbers and sets with some being greater than others. Cantor’s theorem undermined the Pope of a Largest Cardinal number. Here is the heretical theorem; “The cardinality of a set’s power set is strictly greater than the cardinality of the set itself”. That means there are an infinite number of degrees of infinity. The smallest infinity is subversive and known as Aleph-null.

There are infinities besides mathematical degrees of infinity such as physical and metaphysical. The metaphysical infinities cultists don’t worship degrees of mathematical infinities unless they have no choice. Instead they surge religiously into physicalism and prostrate themselves toward tax cuts.

Georg Cantor showed that some infinities are bigger than others. It’s a fascinating matter to consider -useful for contemplating cosmology in addition to Godel’s incompleteness theorems. https://www.transfinite.com/content/transfinitenumbers

Georg Cantor was brilliant and infinities were a topic mathematicians were recalcitrant about facing. He was oppressed by regular academia, although his work is accepted now. Wikipedia notes that he was “a mathematician who played a pivotal role in the creation of set theory, which has become a fundamental theory in mathematics. Cantor established the importance of one-to-one correspondence between the members of two sets, defined infinite and well-ordered sets, and proved that the real numbers are more numerous than the natural numbers. Cantor’s method of proof of this theorem implies the existence of an infinity of infinities. He defined the cardinal and ordinal numbers and their arithmetic. Cantor’s work is of great philosophical interest, a fact he was well aware of.[2]”

https://www.transfinite.com/content/transfinitenumbersI suppose that infinities in extra dimensional spaces are greater than those with fewer dimensions. Cantor’s theorem would still be valid. Pythagoreans would need to add a metaphysical liturgy to the mysteries.

I suppose that infinities in extra dimensional spaces are greater than those with fewer dimensions. Cantor’s theorem would still be valid. Pythagoreans would need to add a metaphysical liturgy to the mysteries.

As a practical matter and with math there are different places and kinds of infinity. One may of course refer to the greatest infinity holding all others- one containing the yo yo universe and all others theoretically even though God may not sponsor such a place because he is spirit and also can’t be defined in terms of distance or scale.

One might want to know if there is a finite or infinite number of regular polygons for making three-dimensional puzzles or for manufacturing containers.

https://youtu.be/ciM6wigZK0w?feature=shared

An equilateral triangle, square and the regular hexagon can fill a plain with no gaps, an infinite one, yet nothing else can. Infinity is an attribute that may be applied to some sets with real applicability. In exploring the shape of a structure or universe calculations for geometry and quantity may involve infinities of scale.

The Universe may have an open, closed or flat shape gravitationally speaking. If it is flat, the most popular model, it extends into infinity perhaps because there isn’t enough gravity to collapse it to a big crunch nor too little such that it would fly apart in expansion. Why could it be balanced just right if it is expanding from a singularity? One might think that  to be perfectly flat the universe should always have existed infinitely: and that is counter-intuitive to observations of a thermodynamic universe and general relativity.

There is a difference between physical and mathematical infinity. If quanta were infinitely divisible that would create issues. Maybe fields are infinitely divisible yet if so the field overall should lose strength as it subdivides. The system may conserve energy yet monism becoming pluralism may have a cost.

https://www.britannica.com/science/infinity-mathematics/Physical-infinities

https://www.astronomy.com/science/what-shape-is-the-universe/

Theological issues concerning infinity differ quite a bit from space-time concerns about infinity. They are different reference frames. Space-time of this observable universe according to the prevailing theory had a start at time=0. So if it is infinite is that way in one direction like a vector that has not yet achieved infinity. It is just 13.2 light years old and 93 billion light years in diameter. Space-time isn’t empty it is a field that expanded from T=0 in the current model. People have wondered about a theoretical empty volume containing matter at least since Heraclitus and Parmenides.

I think Giordano Bruno was burned as much for real politics as theology. The Inquisition was in full force in reaction to the half millennium war against Muslim invaders of Europe. The ruling powers were Christian and wanted any 5th column Muslims to swear allegiance to European values. Spain was only retaken in 1492, and Muslims attacked Vienna in 1529 and 1683. The Muslims m heresy problem and even the Orthodox Christian schism remained challenges to Habsburg authorities. If Europe was placid I doubt that Bruno would have burned. Science is a bit narcissist on that point in recent media. It was about secular political control. People still want secular political control…look at Ukraine.

First Cause of a Universe Misc

 Entropy requires existing things to run down, so that’s a non sequitur so far as causality goes for this poor Aquinian inquiry. David Hume made a good point about causality in dismissal of the relationship with effect. Generally one single item is not the sole cause of anything, except God perhaps whom cannot be said to have a necessary relationship in a physical sense to anything He wills to be. God is spirit and matter is substance, and the substance at its foundation is rather enigmatic rather than a matter that’s ineluctable.

Fields and their content are secondary phenomena of massless field particles entangled in the Higgs field. Entropy is the disassociation of order in that field; a unified field suppositionally that emerged through various phases. Wheeler wrote about retrocausality at any rate and if that exists it could be an amusing attribute for God.

A mind doesn’t seem to be a reflection of nature at all. Instead it is entirely different than matter in-itself and interprets sensations from nature or the state of the fields in which people cohere. People and minds add more to nature than exists in it. Nature is insensible generally with some life forms rising to awareness, Matter and the fields comprising; it unless God concerns Himself with it in some way, is completely dark noumena without rhyme or reason. A mind is not a reflection of that.The values of different points of view are determined by individuals.

Because people do not value all of those viewpoints equally some politicians are elected while others aren’t. That is democracy and market forces apply even concerning viewpoints. For example, Einstein’s viewpoint about relativity was more valued than Irwin Corrie’s generally. On truth theory, there is a social context for truth. One person communicates something to another and what they say should be verifiable as how the state of affairs is. ‘Reality’- a concept, is not so involved as is accuracy of language in communication.

Words can be used to describe nature, and people might agree a statement about it is true yet they all might be wrong about it. Human and social ideas about what is true or false may be wrong. Consider the diversity of opinion about global atmospheric heating or the seriousness of US. public dent reaching 34 trillion dollars. Sartre wrote about social reality in Being and Nothingness and The Critique of Dialectical Reason and noted that colonialists and various power groups sometimes have their own proprietary vocabulary and interpret reality-social reality differently than non-insider groups such as proletariats.