proximoception | (no subject)

The main atheist bloggers are arguing about just how much of an atheist each of them is. One of the bones of contention, the one that interests me most, is approximately this:

If God violates the rules of nature even once, does that mean there are no rules of nature?

One corollary of answering in the affirmative being if you believe in natural rules at all you must disbelieve in God, I guess - since if there's a God life is just a hallucination he's imposing on you with the general appearance of consistency...but if that's the case you can't confirm God's own existence empirically, hence you can't differentiate hallucination-realities manufactured by God from ones manufactured by yourself, since the trustworthiness of the external world has been disproved. Of course, we're all stuck in that one - how do you know the sun will rise tomorrow, that gravity will function a minute from now, that you'll feel your own body a second from now, past the assurance of all those things having stayed stable so far? - but it's interesting that a miracle-working God can't get you out of this bind. You will never know, even in apparent heaven, unless and until completely collapsed into identity with him, assuming even the concepts of distinct identity or lack thereof aren't parts of the present hallucination, whether you are in God's hallucination or he is in yours. And of course you could just be hallucinating you're God even when you are one with God. And a crazy person's assumption they are God would have to be considered true in God's own terms until interrupted by 'reality' (the imposed hallucination of God) which is itself a sort of interruption or holding-apart of miracles, of revelations of reality's hallucinatoriness.

So if you're religious you'll never have a reason to think you're not nuts and/or God. Unless, of course, he must logically exist apart from us. But he mustn't - that one's never flown, if you'll excuse the empiricism of human memory.

But if you go back to the question and answer that nature is real, is itself, but just gets trumped by God when that's what he's into - by answering prayers, sending offspring, causing disasters or whatever - well, what are you basing this on? How can you know?

Suppose the laws of physics worked except when they didn't, and we could observe no absolute laws about when they did and when they didn't (since these, too, would be laws of physics) - what would we be in relation to them? Presumably not having full evidence that reality was following laws gave us gods, magic etc. in the first place: multiple sources of inexplicability. Or, if just one God, his different actions, even if stemming from just one unsharable thought, in effect permitted reality to do whatever, permitted a reality that seemed to be doing whatever to have a viable explanation - or anyway graspable description. If things mostly hold together, do they really hold together? I think my vocabulary is leading me toward a trap here, actually - things, because plural, are by definition able to be both distinct but together, in whatever sense their plurality entails. 'Phenomena' runs into the same problem, but so do singular nouns: if I say 'if reality is only usually itself, can it ever truly be itself?' I may be leading the question again, but in the other direction. A discontinuous state of affairs can be interrupted while still being a state of affairs, if a state of affairs can be discontinuous while still a state. By state I don't mean something like the state of your living room or finances, though - I mean Everything, so we may be running into a problem where you can't analogize the Container with anything merely Contained (living rooms, finances).

Continuities are continuous until they end, let's at least grant that. Would a miracle, say a virgin birth, be like a stop to natural order, or just a sort of hole in it? But how could the hole be contained, why would it end there, not contaminate everything forevermore. Even if God is faking a Y chromosome quite perfectly, whatever means he's using to enter the world to do that faking shouldn't be able to touch it without stopping it from being a world, should they? Even if he's using nanotechnological oven mits of some kind, they're being worn by impossible hands. If what's foreign to it can manipulate it, how can reality be considered to have more ontological integrity than a hallucination God's just rather fond of keeping stable?

Okay, but what if reality is a part of God without being quite, essentially him (so not pantheism - something permitting intelligent action), like his hair or nails, say. That way he's not foreign to it. He shares enough properties with it to wander in, but it's going to do what it does whenever he wanders back out - also in whatever parts he hasn't wandered into, even at the moment he's mirabilifying. Kind of a split-brain God, half animal and half vegetable, where the animal half reaches over and nurtures (or munches on) the vegetable now and then. But there the problem becomes the boundary between them - how do you know what's vegetable, law-following God, and what's caprice God - you're back in the hallucination problem. The impossibility just enters the God-creature himself: the border between the substances, not empirically verifiable because it's the border of empiricism. The border of Spain and France is neither Spain nor France. It's only a border because they both stop. But what two things are stopping here? What things are things anymore?

Also what was I even trying to argue. Oh, whether God is just flat-out impossible, viewed scientifically. I don't think so - we could be running in a simulator, for instance, existing really as Matrix-type brains in ajar way, or just as beings of pure electricity here in the simulation. Our laws of the universe could truly be false, just self-consistent - but in a universe functioning with laws of its own, maybe ones the simulation copies but doesn't necessarily have to. Could the simulator runner be God in the classical sense? No. But he could be a ridiculously powerful entity, from our perspective - and perhaps approaching some kind of absolute moral excellence, all appearances to the contrary. But he wouldn't be God because he'd be bound by the laws of the outer world, whatever they are. There he would be possible, hence his interference would be possible in the mostly-cohesive simulation he's provided us. But the outer world could have no god, just that mere person capable of total power over a simulation. So, yes, I guess God is flat-out impossible on empirical grounds - i.e. on the grounds that there really is a coherent, able-to-be-experienced world. He's possible if empirical grounds aren't possible. And if they're not, all of this is just us and him and something he's making us perceive, a sort of living movie, a livie. Or it's just us not realizing we're him, gone just as mad and thinking damn near whatever.

You may worship virtual-god if you like, but you'd have to drop the 'omnni's. Without which there's really no reason to trust his motives. Or abilities, past his evident skill in making himself look unnecessary. Which, in the outer world, he is.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

but in line with what you said above, any consciousness lacking absolute certainty, no matter the content of its consciousness, can't be certain it's not hallucinating.

i'm not saying that a consciousness possessing absolute certainty is a necessary entity, only that the concept of god requires that characteristic.

degrees of certainty wouldn't come into it. it would be asbolutely certain of everything it knew, and uncertain of nothing.

But could it even have the notion of hallucination? It's either an accurate self-experience of itself, including being accurate about whether its self-experience is accurate, or it's an inaccurate one, and in the latter case it's hard to see how it could imagine itself different than it is, what with being universal. Hallucination would require a split between mind and reality, and a universal mind seems definitionally both at once.

But if you're talking about God, or some other mind beyond the universe, that's different. Could a being beyond the universe that created and controls that universe be hallucinating? It's hard to differentiate creation and hallucination, past the notion of deliberateness, which is a weird one when you're talking about essentially the only thing that's actually happening. If God created the universe against his own will in a dream, a) as you've said, he's not the traditional God, b) it's unclear what will happen when he wakes up, or whether Gods do. Need a universe make sense in order to be a universe? Maybe. Need it make sense for us to mistake it for one? No. So we either don't see God as possible or we don't see impossibility as possible, hence discussable possibility as possible, I guess? I don't know, I'm getting confused.

i guess all i'm saying is i find interesting the idea that there is an entity, somewhere, that has absolute certainty of something, and even better, everything. and that any other type of entity, even if it's above human beings in its capabilities, while interesting, is only infinitesimally fractionally so. and i also find interesting the idea of what it would be like to be granted partial absolute certainty, which is to say certainty about the nature of one's existence. that would be heavenly.