Draygomb

Albert Those are all types of change requiring time. What's your point? Neither Time nor Memory Causes Change. Change occurs and that's how we know Time has passed. Even if the change is only in our memory that change requires time. Even if true it is irrelevant. The fact that something was somewhere and now isn't is a change that requires time. No, That's 3 moments or time frames.
Time frame with position A
Time frame with no position
Time frame with position B

Albert Cipriani

Dear Draygomb,


Traditionally, God is called the non-contingent Being. But one cannot define something with a negative. Ergo, God is Subsistent Being (ipsum esse subsistens). Another way of saying this is that God is pure act without any admixture of potentiality (actus purus sine omni permixtione potentiae).

The best way to understand what is meant by Yahweh (I Am Who Am) God is to distinguish between what is meant by existence and being.

We and the universe merely exist. That is, we know what we know on the experiential basis of what does and does not exist. It's incestuous! As life requires life (i.e. consumption) to maintain its own life, so too, existence requires existence to maintain its awareness of its own existence.

Being is an order of magnitude beyond mere existence. Being is necessarily inconceivable and unknowable. Being creates existence like a boat creates it's own wake while not being the wake. Its confusion with the wake is the confusion of Pantheism. To express this graphically, if you could be a grain of sand, not experience what it's like to exist as a grain of sand, you would be God.

To sum up, everything exists, only God is. Ironically, your question contained its answer. You asked me to define "what God is," and the answer is that God is. – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

JonAkbarSpielberg

A. C. said:

I thought this might be funny. Don't take it seriously.

IF:
A=1 B=2 C=3 D=4 E=5 F=6 G=7 H=8 I=9 J=10 K=11 L=12 M=13 N=14 O=15 P=16 Q=17 R=18 S=19 T=20 U=21 V=22 W=23 X=24 Y=25 Z=26

Then:
H A R D W O R K =
8+1+18+4+23+15+18+11 = Only 98%
Similarly,

K N O W L E D G E =
11+14+15+23+12+5+4+7+5 = Only 96%
But interesting (and as you'd expect),

A T T I T U D E =
1+20+20+9+20+21+4+5 = 100%..... This is how you achieve 100% in LIFE.

But EVEN MORE IMPORTANT TO NOTE (or REALIZE), is

B U L L S H I T =
2+21+12+12+19+8+9+20 = 103%

daemon

Are my roots showing so obviously?
It would be inaccurate, at best, to say that binary mathematical notation has anything to do with what information is in computer science, much less the world in general. Binary notation is a method of translating data of one form into a universally digitally usable format.

Just a nitpick, really.
Actually, as the solipsist shows, knowledge of self-existence does not require the existence of anything other than the self. How can you prove that anything exists outside of yourself, logically?
Can God not be detected? I am told by many Christians that they can feel God--his love, his influence in their lives, etc. Some have stories of divine apparitions of various forms. Do you deny that any of these occur? This is the only way that I could reconcile the two notions.

This is actually digging into one of my pet peeves: the statement of the undetectability of God contradicted by belief in revelation. If God is not detectable, revelation is bunk.
Better to state it as such, then.
How does this relate to all things? For example, that statement is a tautological statement of our common mathematical system. It doesn't relate to anything except math. If you mean to say that it can relate to everything through its relation to math, then it appears to reduce its significance to a tautology.
Sorry, I'll try to find more of what you say illogical. Tough as that might be.
(As I wasn't confused about this part, I'll jump straight down to...)
Well, this is the problem with playing with semantics as much as you have here. By saying that "touch" is equivalent to information, and that all spiritual things touch each other, this means that all spiritual things have information about all other spiritual things. However, this is not the case according to you, so clearly information is not synonymous with touch, experience, or existence.
Sorry, I don't follow this at all.
I'm not following this either.
Sorry, but I've drawn this conclusion from what you have said. Allow me to lay out the premises that you have presented to me, and from what I know of standard Catholic dogmas:
P1: What a thing is, is what a thing knows.
P2: God is omniscient (knows everything).
C1: God is everything.

Now, if this is wrong, clearly one of those two premises is wrong. As I doubt you will deny omniscience, being an important premise to your Catholic identity, there is clearly something wrong with the first premise there.
So, for the first part, you believe that God is thinker, thinkee, and thought itself. For the second part, you believe God is, in brief, not all things. Now, in order for these two to sync, God doesn't think about anything except himself, because anything he thinks about is him, and I somehow doubt this is what you meant. You'll obviously have to explain further.
*blink* What? I find Thomas's words more unintelligable than yours, helped nothing by a thousand years and another language, I'm certain.
I'll take your word for it--I'm no less bewildered about what you say than I was before.

daemon

Perhaps you're using some arcane and nonstandard form of the words "is" and "exists," but in the plain sense of the words, that which is exists, and that which exists is.

Tharmas

If I may intrude into this discussion with a quick question, Mr. Cipriani, you mentioned in an earlier post that you would find yourself “depressed” to be thought a “mystic.” I find myself wondering why that is the case. I find myself believing that, had I an answer to this puzzling question I would have a fair understanding of “why Mr. Cipriani believes in God.”

Albert Cipriani

Dear Sandlewood,


How depressing! This is why I expressed my dread to Jaliet at the beginning of this thread. To ask me to give you my reason for believing in God, forces me to say many many things. Saying one thing is so much easier. But I shall sally forth, accompanied with a sense of doom.

You ask:


Occam's razor argues for objects being information. Why introduce the entity of object when an object is only an ontological convenience whereby we seem to obtain information?



Information is a thing itself. For example, the photon from the star that bulls-eyed my brain that got converted into an electrochemical synapse that participated in me forming the word "star" whose sound waves bulls-eyed your brain etc.

You argue:


If that is true, what is to stop me from saying the same thing about you? That is, you do not have the information you claim to have, rather "it is my brain's understanding and organization of the visual impulses [I gather from you]... that I call information."



Yes! My metaphysics does not rely on the artificial distinction between material and immaterial. It's all information. At some point we may arbitrarily call some information supernatural, like we arbitrarily call the warmer shades of orange "red," but it is pure semantics and is not rationally substantive.



That's because water also derives from dams and clouds and springs. If, as I contend, ALL information derives from things and it's inconceivable and pragmatically impossible to derive information from anything other than a thing, then the concept of "thing" can be logically dropped from our epistemology.

For example, we may eat off a silver tray or we may eat out of a brown paper bag, the eating is what sustains us, not the tray or bag. Likewise, we know what we know whether or not there "really" are things (whatever that means) out there or there is only the information that's served to us through what appears to be things. It's the information that sustains our knowledge, not the things through which we ontologically suppose that information is served.



Each exerts a gravitational force on the other, as does the most distant speck of dust in the farthest flung outreaches of the universe. That's how they are practically related. But they are also metaphysically related in time and space at the moment of the first moment, when the singularity that contained our universe was in every sense of the word, One, like you were as a zygote, before your first division.



No, only living things that will to accept the relationships they experience can know. But yes, I believe the rocks experience their mutual relationship.

My definition of information is touch. The rocks' intertwined gravitational fields are a form of touch. Ergo, they have information of one another's presence. If inanimate matter is conscious (which I personally believe, but need not believe to sustain my metaphysics), then their information of one another is experiential. And rocks can be seen as the ultimate existential beings. Heavy! No?



What is your source for this assertion? If you can back this up, you will have destroyed my two hypotheses.

Thank you for trying to understand me. It's more that I can say for my wife. She has me talk metaphysics when she's having trouble getting to sleep. – Alas, Albert the Traditional Catholic
<img src="graemlins/boohoo.gif" border="0" alt="[Boo Hoo]" />

Jobar

quote:
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We have never observed that reality works in discrete steps. As small as we can measure change, movement seems to be continuous.

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Not so. At the quantum level, change is often discontinuous. That is what a 'quantum jump' is describing- a change of energy level with a starting point and an endpoint, but no midpoints. This is one of the extremely counterintuitive aspects of quantum mechanics.

Albert, I am going to keep gently poking at you about your denial of mysticism and pantheism. Your dichotomy between Being and Existence looks false to me. Can you expand on it? Your metaphor of the ship and its wake is pretty but not really applicable. The ship, the motion, the wake- there is no way to say whether it is the motion of the ship, or the motion of the water which causes the wake. And I think you must prove that there is a Prime Mover that always acts, and is never acted *upon*, to support any possible dichotomy. Nothing like that exists physically- just ask Albert Einstein!

Albert Cipriani

Dear Tharmas,
Gurus and mystics are elitists. I don't care if they don't mean to be. They are. If they are the genuine articles, then they are poster children for an arrogant god that disgusts me.

I dreamed once that I'd died and gone to heaven. But it was a conveyor belt sort of experience. There were scores of us getting deeper and deeper into it. First we emerged from ocean surf, then we were in a garden with umbrella tables and bowls of Jell-O, then there was a wall.

The sun was setting behind the cinderblock wall and we all knew we had to keep on moving toward it. Yet we were afraid of what might be on the other side. Because this side with the Jell-O was so pleasant, none of us wanted to leave.

Finally I used a tree to scale the wall, looking down to the other side as far as I could see was an identical scene as the one we were in. The little round tables with their umbrellas, but instead of bowls of Jell-O, there were bowls of custard. That made me cry.

I realized what God the poet meant. Jell-O, as grateful as we were for it, was made of the dead hooves of cows. But custard was made from the living loving mother’s milk of cows. Translation: what God had in mind for us was intimate, loving, human, AND COMMON.

Ergo, if there is a God, and He is worthy of His name, He is not reachable, but outreaching. Practice all the yoga you want; eat all the yogurt you can stand; be as mystical or smart, or have a tribe of gurus showing you the way; none of this should get you one inch closer to Him. Rather, should you get closer to Him, it was Him getting closer to you.

This is why I find the concept of myself being a mystic or anyone being a guru (and all means and methods of seeking God) repugnant. It is arrogant to imagine that God can be sought experientially. He is the seeker. It's enough if we allow ourselves to be found. -- Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Draygomb

Albert

If you hadn't scaled the wall and instead sat around waiting for god to come to you, you would have been eating jello. How do you know there is nothing beyond custard?

Just some thoughts. I'd rather have the answers to my previous post.