yguy

Fine. Maybe someone from thousands of years in the future can tap you on the shoulder and explain how a circle can be square.

Exactly my point. It is very likely that the idea of lines on a sphere never entered Euclid's head, any more than it occurred to anyone to test Aristotle's assertions about heavy objects falling faster than light ones for hundreds of years.

I don't see how that's possible, since at the very least, I am ignorant of how I appear to you. Show me the person with perfect self-knowledge, and we'll talk.

Possibly, except that I believe all truth has the same source.

No, a child can see hypocrisy in a parent before it can verbalize the concept. I wouldn't call that programming.

It is in my mind.

Sort of, except that I would rather say, "I see that I am, therefore I am.

You have to know it's there. While it appears you know it's there through sensory input, the light is what tells you how valid the input is.

Not the core of your being. You can observe your own thoughts, emotions, etc., but you can't observe yourself.

I'm missing the contradiction.

The point is that saying X does not equal Y tells you essentially nothing about X.

I wouldn't agree with that. To say that God doesn't get angry in the commonly used sense of the word is light-years away from saying He is mild-mannered.

That seems to be the point of miscommunication. I can't possibly tell you what God is beyond what I have. The best I can do is tell you what He is not.

For the life of me, I can't understand how X can be said to be described by saying it is not Y. If you witnessed a hit and run accident, and you told the police the car wasn't a VW beetle, and nothing else, would you expect anything more appreciative than "Thanks for nothing"?

He isn't. God is just a label we hang on Him for the sake of discussion. You could say He is love, or truth, or life, I suppose; but it would only lead to endless quibbling over definitions.

No. We appear to have a fundamental disagreement.

If we were talking about an object, that would be correct.

Jesse

Jesse:
Sure he could, if you explained to him that you were defining lines on a curved surface as "straight lines".

yguy:
Fine. Maybe someone from thousands of years in the future can tap you on the shoulder and explain how a circle can be square.

No, an analogous situation would be that someone shows me how if you change the meaning of the words "square" and "circle" so that they no longer correspond exactly to the traditional geometric notions of them, then a square could be a circle. But it will always be impossible that something could be both a square and a circle in the sense we think of them now, just as it would be impossible for parallel lines to meet in the sense that Euclid conceived of the words "lines" and "parallel."

Jesse:
The fact that you can modify Euclid's axioms just shows that you shouldn't get too hung up on any given mental image of what the entities described by the axioms "really are"--different concrete situations can be described by identical or very similar axiomatic systems.

yguy:
Exactly my point. It is very likely that the idea of lines on a sphere never entered Euclid's head, any more than it occurred to anyone to test Aristotle's assertions about heavy objects falling faster than light ones for hundreds of years.

Aristotle can be proved wrong by experiment. Euclid, on the other hand, was completely justified in thinking that parallel lines in a plane could never cross, and the fact that we can use the words "parallel lines" to denote something else doesn't change that.

Jesse:
So is that a condition for having something as an "object" in your mind? If I know a lot about you, but nothing that you don't already know yourself, are you an object in my mind?

yguy:
I don't see how that's possible, since at the very least, I am ignorant of how I appear to you. Show me the person with perfect self-knowledge, and we'll talk.

Maybe you don't appear as anything to me, because I've never interacted with you and all I know is your name and species. I would say I can still treat you as an object of thought, even if a very vague one.

Jesse:
Well, it sounds like you're advocating your own version of "platonic truth", except about morality instead of math.

yguy:
Possibly, except that I believe all truth has the same source.

Well, a Platonist can believe all Platonic truths have the same source too, like thinking of them as eternal ideas in the mind of God.

Jesse:
Unless you think I know hypocrisy is wrong because God chose to design me with certain a priori beliefs-

yguy:
No, a child can see hypocrisy in a parent before it can verbalize the concept. I wouldn't call that programming.

Why not? You're saying God couldn't program kids to recognize something they can't verbalize? Babies seem to be "programmed" to recognize plenty of things, whether by evolution or by God (or both).

In any case, it seems you are arguing that we recognize certain truths by accessing a sort of Platonic source of truth, rather than by God hardwiring it into our brain, so this isn't really important to discuss.

Jesse:
-is the connection that both involve a priori knowledge that I can't justify in terms of anything else? "I think therefore I am" and all that?

yguy:
Sort of, except that I would rather say, "I see that I am, therefore I am.

OK, so you're saying we have to access some external source of truth, ie God, in order to recognize this? Some philosophers would say that "I think therefore I am" is the one thing that we can know is true without needing any external validation--merely by awareness of your own consciousness, you recognize that you exist. But I guess you'd disagree with this.

So what's the reason that God can't say "I see that I am, therefore I am"? As long as he can access this source of truth (himself), why does it matter that the source is not external?

Jesse:
OK, I didn't realize that you were differentiating between my self and my mind. So--can my own self be an object of thought for me?

yguy:
Not the core of your being. You can observe your own thoughts, emotions, etc., but you can't observe yourself.

But other people can observe the core of my being? Even people who hardly know me at all?

Jesse:
So--can my own self be an object of thought for me? If not, what's the crucial difference here with Oliver Twist, if both need the truth shining a light on them, yet Oliver Twist can be an object of thought for me?

yguy:
I'm missing the contradiction.

Well, this sub-topic about self-recognition goes back to this exchange:

Here I thought your answer to the question of why God's self could not be an object of thought for him was that he needed "the light of truth" shining on it. But according to you, so does Oliver Twist, yet Oliver Twist can be an object of thought for him. Actually looking back on this I'm even more confused because in answer to my question about whether God could be an object to himself, you answered that I can "know I'm here" because of an external truth but God can't, as if you were equating "knowing I'm here" with "having oneself as an object of thought" (if not, your response seems to be a bit of a non sequitor, since my question was about whether I could be an object of my own thought, not whether I could 'know I'm here').

Maybe we should start from the basics with these questions:
--Can I know I exist?
--Can God know he exists?
--Can I be an object of my own thought?
--Can God be an object of his own thought?

Finally, in each case, what's the justification for your answer? From what I understand, I can know I exist but God can't, because you need an external truth telling you that (I don't really understand why it needs to be 'external' though...if it's somehow impossible to access this source of truth unless it's external, does that mean God can't recognize hypocrisy, or mathematical truth, or any other a priori truths?) Also, you seem to be saying that neither I nor God can be an object of our own thought, but I'm not really clear on the reasons for this, although it seems to have something to do with only being able to treat something as an object of thought if you can recognize something about it that it itself can't recognize about itself (I don't really understand why you would say this either, since it certainly does not correspond to what anyone else seems to mean when they talk about 'objects of thought', but see my questions earlier in this post).

Jesse:
I don't see your point. "Not a walrus" could "theoretically" be an incorrect description of me too...how does this relate to your view that somehow negative descriptions of things don't count as "conceptualizing" them but positive descriptions do?

yguy:
The point is that saying X does not equal Y tells you essentially nothing about X.

Again, that looks like a qualititative difference between negative and positive descriptions, not a fundamental one. Both tell you something about X, even if it is very close to nothing. And some positive descriptions also tell you essentially nothing about X...for example "X is a material object" or "X is a 'thing'" (using your definition) or "X has a cause".

Jesse:
There's no clear-cut difference between "negative" statements and "positive" ones...for example, is it really so different to say "Bob does not easily anger" and "Bob is fairly mild-mannered"?

yguy:
But again, there are unconscious assumptions here, because in common parlance they are very similar, but in strictly logical terms they are not. The Bob who doesn't easily anger, for instance, could be dead.

Jesse:
Even so, I don't see any fundamental difference between negative descriptions and positive descriptions--both exclude certain things and include others.

yguy:
I wouldn't agree with that. To say that God doesn't get angry in the commonly used sense of the word is light-years away from saying He is mild-mannered.

Sure, but you're proving my point--it may be "light years away" in terms of the amount it includes and excludes, but that's a quantitative difference rather than a fundamental one. Both descriptions exclude something and thus tell you a nonzero amount of information about God, even if the positive description "God is mild-mannered" would tell you much much more about God.

Jesse:
It seems like it's just a quantitative difference, that negative descriptions generally only exclude a small number of things (in this case, the class of all things that anger easily) while including everything else (anything that doesn't fit into that class, including dead people). Positive descriptions, on the other hand, usually include a relatively small number of things and exclude everything else.

yguy:
That seems to be the point of miscommunication. I can't possibly tell you what God is beyond what I have. The best I can do is tell you what He is not.

And I'm saying that there is no fundamental difference between telling me what he is not and telling me what he is--the difference is only quantitative. So in both cases you are describing him to some degree, and thus "conceptualizing" him.

Jesse:
Again, I don't understand what "light" in your metaphors is supposed to stand for. And isn't categorizing me as "not a walrus" a conceptualization of me that has "a percentage of accuracy greater than zero"? So why isn't "uncaused" a conceptualization of God that has a percentage accuracy greater than zero too?

yguy:
For the life of me, I can't understand how X can be said to be described by saying it is not Y. If you witnessed a hit and run accident, and you told the police the car wasn't a VW beetle, and nothing else, would you expect anything more appreciative than "Thanks for nothing"?

In a practical sense, sure it would be useless, but in a fundamental sense you've given me a tiny bit more than zero bits of information about the car. If the police were to interrogate every car owner in the city about the accident, their search would be cut down ever so slightly if I could specify that the car was not a VW beetle. Of course the search time would be cut down by much more if I could specify that the car was a Jaguar--then they could throw out ever candidate except for Jaguar owners (a lot) instead of just throwing out VW beetle owners (a little).

Remember, you're saying that God is fundamentally impossible to conceptualize at all, not just that he's very hard to conceptualize. You're saying there's some kind of fundamental difference there, not just a practical quantitative difference.

Jesse:
OK, "describable by nouns".

yguy:
He isn't. God is just a label we hang on Him for the sake of discussion. You could say He is love, or truth, or life, I suppose; but it would only lead to endless quibbling over definitions.

"describable by nouns" = "label-able by nouns". And really, every noun is just a label you hang on for the sake of discussion--it's not as if strings of letters have any fundamental meaning in themselves.

Jesse:
Or "the class of all 'things', plus God." The point of all this is, you seemed to say earlier that "you cannot agree" that there is any class which includes both "things" (using your notion of what this word means) and God, which seems obviously false to me. Was I misunderstanding you?

yguy:
No. We appear to have a fundamental disagreement.

You deny that God belongs in a class which by definition includes him? I think you're going into the realm of mystical paradoxes, as I said earlier. "The Tao that can be named is not the true Tao" and such. That's fine I guess, except that unlike mystics you don't seem to be acknowledging that every sentence you use which includes the word "God" at all is in some sense self-contradictory or misleading. You seem to treat statements like "God is uncaused" as unproblematically true and rational statements about reality (using your illogical argument that somehow it is possible to draw an absolutely clear-cut line between 'negative' descriptions and 'positive' ones).

Jesse:
You can't posit that X exists without specifying in any way what X refers to. For example, it is meaningless to say "I posit that smeegoflaks exist" unless I am willing to say at least a little bit about what the word "smeegoflak" means.

yguy:
If we were talking about an object, that would be correct.

So "I posit that smeegoflaks exist" is a meaningful statement if I add that "smeegoflaks are not objects"?

yguy

Sure, but it never occurred to him that planes might be other than flat - and that in fact, flat planes are essentially purely theoretical constructs with respect to anything bigger than a few hundred feet in any dimension.

So we agree?

I have no problem with that.

Yes.

Yes, because that awareness is a gift.

Because it is not by a greater light than His that He sees that He is.

I don't think I can answer that. Seems a pretty clear distinction from any other sentient being under the paradigm we're discussing.

They can see aspects of it. For instance, if you're hiding something, even from yourself, it's possible for a person to see THAT you're hiding it, even if they can't see WHAT you're hiding.

Not in the same sense that we do, as He is the source of those truths. Recognition seems to imply a moment of ignorance before the mental connection is made.

You do seem to be getting a bit tangled up. I suspect you're trying too hard to figure this out. If all I'm doing is confusing you, the discussion needs to stop, because that is not my intent.

But the example involves a finite number of possibilities. What we're talking about with respect to God goes not just beyond the infinite, but beyond the transfinite. 1/infinity is generally taken to equal 0 mathematically, is it not?

They are not equivalent. Nouns are generally associated with some concept which describes what is being named. To the extent that they are ONLY labels, they are meaningless.

I'm saying you cannot logically place Him in a class with anything.

In a sense, that's true. I believe it's why many Jews refer to Him as G_d. It's the place where words always fail.

Again, I don't see anything illogcial about that argument.

You prejudice the question by equating God to an obviously fanciful concept. If you are complaining that words about characteristics of God are meaningless, have I not said as much?

Hawkingfan

I am not a scientist, but I know the answer is "no", because the electromagnetic attraction between the negatively charged electrons and the positively charged protons in the nucleus makes the electrons circumnavigate the nucleus. It doesn't collide with the nucleus because in classic mechanics there is not an allowed orbit there. The quantum mechanics way of looking at it is that the electron cannot collide with the nucleus because of its wave function. The electrons do not collide with each other because of their electrostatic force. In classical mechanics, the electrons move also because of their massless particles of spin 1 that they are constantly emitting. They move from recoil and absorption. Also, the recoil may move the electron from one allowed orbit to another and give of that particle (photon) which we see as light.

[/QUOTE]Then let one of them tell me what makes a particle behave in an unpredictable manner.[/B][/QUOTE]

It is a hard fact of science. The electron itself doesn't "know" the answer either. It's like trying to look at two sides of a coin at the same time. It is impossible. The fact is, is that the electron cannot have a location *and* velocity at the *same time*. That is why it is unpredictable (in at least 100% certainty of where it will go). In QM, you can see the sum over histories of what path the electron has orbitted and calculate probabilities on which orbit will be next. But even though we don't know which one will be next 100% certain, we know that all possible paths will eventually be travelled.

(Any real scientist out there feel free to correct anything, but I think I have the gist of it).

yguy

My understanding is that an electron's position and momentum cannot be known simultaneously, not that the electron is lacking in either.

But none of this answers the question. That the unpredictability of an electron's motion is "a hard fact of science" is not news.

Jesse

Jesse:
Euclid, on the other hand, was completely justified in thinking that parallel lines in a plane could never cross, and the fact that we can use the words "parallel lines" to denote something else doesn't change that.

yguy:
Sure, but it never occurred to him that planes might be other than flat - and that in fact, flat planes are essentially purely theoretical constructs with respect to anything bigger than a few hundred feet in any dimension.

But by talking about non-flat planes, you're changing the meaning of the word "plane". Again, Euclid was completely justified in thinking that parallel lines in a plane could never cross, provided you don't change the meaning of any of these words from the "traditional" meaning he was using. There's a whole branch of math known as "model theory" devoted to coming up with mental models for the various undefined terms in a particular axiomatic system, in order to see, for example, whether the axioms will lead to contradictions or not. The book Godel’s Proof gives a simple example (p. 15):

By interpreting the basic undefined terms in the axioms—"members of K" and "members of L"—as corresponding to vertices and edges on our mental models of triangles, we show that the axioms don’t lead to contradictions, assuming there is nothing contradictory about our mental model. However, it’s conceivable you could change one or more of the axioms and still have a consistent system—the undefined terms could no longer refer to vertices and edges of triangles in this case, but you might find some other mental model which they did describe accurately (lines and vertices on a pyramid, perhaps). But this wouldn’t prove we were wrong to think that, for example, an edge of a triangle can contain only two vertices—it would just show that when you modify an axiomatic system, even if it no longer describes the original mental model you had, it may describe some new mental model. This is exactly what happened in the case of the modification to Euclid’s axioms for geometry in a plane, which lead to an axiomatic system that no longer described plane geometry, but it did describe geometry on curved surfaces. Again, this just shows the flexibility of undefined terms in axiomatic systems, it doesn’t prove that Euclid was wrong to be absolutely confident that his axioms must be true if you assume the undefined terms are given their usual interpretation in plane geometry.

Jesse:
So is that a condition for having something as an "object" in your mind? If I know a lot about you, but nothing that you don't already know yourself, are you an object in my mind?

yguy:
I don't see how that's possible, since at the very least, I am ignorant of how I appear to you. Show me the person with perfect self-knowledge, and we'll talk.

Jesse:
Maybe you don't appear as anything to me, because I've never interacted with you and all I know is your name and species. I would say I can still treat you as an object of thought, even if a very vague one.

yguy:
So we agree?

On what? You’re saying that if I know hardly anything about you, then you won’t be an object of thought for me? But where do you draw the line? What if I have a very brief exchange with you via email, would I then know something about you that you don’t know, namely "how you appear to me"? What if the only words exchanged were "hey" and "whassup"?

The point is, you seem to treat "having X as an object of thought" as an absolutely binary issue. But if your criteria for having X as an object of thought is "knowing something about X that X doesn’t know about itself", I don’t see how this can be so binary.

Incidentally, why use this definition in the first place? It seems totally different from what everyone else means by "having X as an object of thought". When and why did you choose this particular definition?

Jesse:
-is the connection that both involve a priori knowledge that I can't justify in terms of anything else? "I think therefore I am" and all that?

yguy:
Sort of, except that I would rather say, "I see that I am, therefore I am.

Jesse:
OK, so you're saying we have to access some external source of truth, ie God, in order to recognize this?

yguy:
Yes.

Is it important that this source be external? As you said yourself, nothing would be external to God. Does this mean God cannot recognize that he exists?

Jesse:
Some philosophers would say that "I think therefore I am" is the one thing that we can know is true without needing any external validation--merely by awareness of your own consciousness, you recognize that you exist. But I guess you'd disagree with this.

yguy:
Yes, because that awareness is a gift.

Well, the fact that you have such awareness may be because of a "gift" from an external source, but the awareness itself does not seem to be something external that I have to check. It seems like a part of me—if I didn’t have awareness, "I" wouldn’t exist.

Jesse:
So what's the reason that God can't say "I see that I am, therefore I am"?

yguy:
Because it is not by a greater light than His that He sees that He is.

So you’re saying he can’t say this, and therefore is not aware of his own existence as we are? You seem to answer differently in reply to my question below:

Jesse:
As long as he can access this source of truth (himself), why does it matter that the source is not external?

yguy:
I don't think I can answer that. Seems a pretty clear distinction from any other sentient being under the paradigm we're discussing.

You can’t answer whether God can be aware he exists without accessing an external source of truth? Then why did you say:

and

Jesse:
But other people can observe the core of my being? Even people who hardly know me at all?

yguy:
They can see aspects of it. For instance, if you're hiding something, even from yourself, it's possible for a person to see THAT you're hiding it, even if they can't see WHAT you're hiding.

Again, do you think this "observing the core of my being" is a strictly binary thing? Someone either has seen an aspect of the core of my being, or they haven’t?

And does any knowledge about me that I don’t know myself count as an aspect of the core of my being? Also, if I realize some fact about myself that I didn’t know before, like that I was hiding something, then if that was the only fact you knew about me that I didn’t know myself, would you suddenly lose me as an "object of thought"?

OK, here were your answers to my questions:

As I pointed out earlier, your simple answer of "yes" to the question of whether God can know he exists seems to contradict your earlier theory that I can only know of my own existence because of a source of truth external to myself. Also, your reason for my not being able to be an object of my own thought is that I can’t observe myself—but what do you mean by "observe" here? Obviously I can physically observe myself, in a mirror for example. And I can self-reflect, thinking about myself and my behavior, motivations, etc. Earlier you seemed to say the crucial issue in having X as an object of thought was "knowing something about X that X does not know itself", but that is certainly not the usual definition of what it means to "observe" something.

Jesse:
Finally, in each case, what's the justification for your answer? From what I understand, I can know I exist but God can't, because you need an external truth telling you that (I don't really understand why it needs to be 'external' though...if it's somehow impossible to access this source of truth unless it's external, does that mean God can't recognize hypocrisy, or mathematical truth, or any other a priori truths?)

yguy:
Not in the same sense that we do, as He is the source of those truths. Recognition seems to imply a moment of ignorance before the mental connection is made.

I don’t think it necessarily implies that, it just means to be able to see when individual behaviors fall into the category "hypocrisy" or individual statements fall into the category "mathematical truth". In any case, feel free to substitute the word "know" for "recognize" there—does God know when a particular action is hypocritical, or when a particular mathematical statement is true? Does he know that he exists? I feel like you’ve given me a bunch of different answers to this question, it seems like you don’t have a clear system worked out in advance that justifies the various answers you give to questions I ask.

Jesse:
Also, you seem to be saying that neither I nor God can be an object of our own thought, but I'm not really clear on the reasons for this, although it seems to have something to do with only being able to treat something as an object of thought if you can recognize something about it that it itself can't recognize about itself (I don't really understand why you would say this either, since it certainly does not correspond to what anyone else seems to mean when they talk about 'objects of thought', but see my questions earlier in this post).

yguy:
You do seem to be getting a bit tangled up. I suspect you're trying too hard to figure this out. If all I'm doing is confusing you, the discussion needs to stop, because that is not my intent.

Well, the real question is, do you have a system all figured out that allows you to answer these questions with confidence? Or are you just answering based on your intuitions or something? If the latter, that may explain some apparent contradictions in your answers, which you might want to examine more closely if you care about consistency. If you don’t really care so much about consistency, then perhaps it’s not worth it to have this long drawn-out discussion of the fine points of your philosophy—if you want to end this at any point I’d be fine with that (and I might have to end it myself if my posts continue to be this long!)

yguy:
For the life of me, I can't understand how X can be said to be described by saying it is not Y. If you witnessed a hit and run accident, and you told the police the car wasn't a VW beetle, and nothing else, would you expect anything more appreciative than "Thanks for nothing"?

Jesse:
In a practical sense, sure it would be useless, but in a fundamental sense you've given me a tiny bit more than zero bits of information about the car. If the police were to interrogate every car owner in the city about the accident, their search would be cut down ever so slightly if I could specify that the car was not a VW beetle. Of course the search time would be cut down by much more if I could specify that the car was a Jaguar--then they could throw out ever candidate except for Jaguar owners (a lot) instead of just throwing out VW beetle owners (a little).

yguy:
But the example involves a finite number of possibilities. What we're talking about with respect to God goes not just beyond the infinite, but beyond the transfinite. 1/infinity is generally taken to equal 0 mathematically, is it not?

I’m not sure how 1/infinity relates to all this, but put it this way—do you think the statement "X is an odd integer" contains more information than "X is an integer"? Either way, there are still an infinite number of possibilities, but the first statement does tell you something the second does not.

In any case, I still don’t see why negative descriptions are fundamentally different from positive ones, even when dealing with infinities. Is "X is an integer that is not even" different from "X is an odd integer"? Is "God is omniscient" different from "there are no limits to God’s knowledge"?

Jesse:
I think you're going into the realm of mystical paradoxes, as I said earlier. "The Tao that can be named is not the true Tao" and such. That's fine I guess, except that unlike mystics you don't seem to be acknowledging that every sentence you use which includes the word "God" at all is in some sense self-contradictory or misleading.

yguy:
In a sense, that's true. I believe it's why many Jews refer to Him as G_d. It's the place where words always fail.

I think most Jews just write G_d because they consider his name to holy to write, not because they think God is impossible to describe in any way. There are plenty of positive descriptions of God in the Old Testament, for example.

As for mysticism, although it’s true that mystics often use negative descriptions of God or the Tao or whatever, I think most of them would recognize that in a sense negative descriptions fall into the trap of dualistic conceptual thought just as much as positive ones. You seem to be saying that although we’d be contradicting ourselves if we used positive descriptions, negative descriptions are unproblematic.

Jesse:
You seem to treat statements like "God is uncaused" as unproblematically true and rational statements about reality (using your illogical argument that somehow it is possible to draw an absolutely clear-cut line between 'negative' descriptions and 'positive' ones).

yguy:
Again, I don't see anything illogcial about that argument.

Well, did I convince you that when we’re dealing with a finite number of possibilities, there is no fundamental difference between negative and positive descriptions? As for dealing with an infinite number of possibilities, see my questions above.

Jesse:
You can't posit that X exists without specifying in any way what X refers to. For example, it is meaningless to say "I posit that smeegoflaks exist" unless I am willing to say at least a little bit about what the word "smeegoflak" means.

yguy:
If we were talking about an object, that would be correct.

Jesse:
So "I posit that smeegoflaks exist" is a meaningful statement if I add that "smeegoflaks are not objects"?

yguy:
You prejudice the question by equating God to an obviously fanciful concept. If you are complaining that words about characteristics of God are meaningless, have I not said as much?

Well, since "smeegoflaks" is just a bunch of letters put together without a definition, I would say they are neither "fanciful" nor a "concept"! (discuss amongst yourselves ) But what I’m getting at is that I think your statements about "God" only even seem to make sense because we have a whole background of implicit positive ideas about what the word "God" means that keeps the word from being totally meaningless like "smeegoflaks"—for example, God is seen as the creator of the universe, God is seen as being infinitely good and infitely just (as opposed to evil or unfair), omniscient and omnipotent (as opposed to limited in knowledge and/or power), personal (as opposed to a mindless force), etc. But according to you, all such positive descriptions should be illegitimate. So suppose you met someone who had none of this background, who was totally unfamiliar with the word "God" and what it symbolizes—what could you say about "God" to convince him that you were just talking meaningless nonsense, without making any positive statements or conceptualizing him or describing him as a member of some class? What reason could you give him to think the word "God" is more meaningful than "smeegoflak"?

Hawkingfan

I've heard it explained both ways. The above way is the most popular and would indeed imply that there is a chance that the electron may be predictable, but that we just cannot measure it. Because the way we measure the position of the particle is to shine light on it in a high energy of quanta in order to be very precise. But it's that very quanta they use that disturbs the velocities in an unpredictable way.
But I have heard the other way of explaining it, too (even in these classical terms we are using, I just have to figure out where I saw it so I can quote it).
Of course as I mentioned, we are discussing this in terms of classical mechanics, not quantum mechanics (which is fine, because my understanding is that the two can be interchanged and are both valid). But QM handles the Uncertainty Principle differently by way of a group of theories where particles do not have well-defined positions and velocities but are represented by waves. Those theories are in fact used in predictions in the sense that they give laws for the evolution of the wave with time. The only time it is unpredictable is when they try to transpose the wave back to position and velocity terms. This may sound like cheating, but it does suggest that that there may be no position or velocity at all, only waves.

I'll admit, you got me thinking. What is the *true* nature of the Uncertainty Principle? Is it due to man's err to measure without disturbing? Is it predictable but we just aren't able to tell? This is a good conversation.

Jesse

Have you read this thread?

God and Uncertainty

As I pointed out there, the violation of Bell's inequality in the EPR experiment proves that the only way for particles to have well-defined position and momentum at all times--which in QM would be known as a theory of "hidden variables"--is to allow the particles to communicate faster-than-light, or to allow measurements in the present to have an influence on the particle's past state. The EPR experiment shows that no theory of "local hidden variables" can explain correlations in measurements of particles separated by large distances.

Hawkingfan

Aha! So my original statement was correct, no? I think it was Hawking who said it. Anyway, thanks for the link. I didn't read it before going through this thread, but I will right now.

yguy

Look, all I know is that if I'd been Euclid, it would likely never have occurred to me to think of planes as anything but flat. Likewise I cannot imagine a square circle. The point is that the possibility of circles being square is independent of my or anyone else's ability to conceptualize such a thing.

That wouldn't be enough to believe there was a real person on the other end; i.e., you could be a patient in a mental hospital and that could be your voices talking through you. That is, I wouldn't know it was an actual person. It could just as easily be email sent out to a thousand people by some idiot kid.

Where do I draw the line? Damned if I know. Even on a board, I can usually tell whether I can connect with a person on some level - but I don't know how. Often I'm able to see things about them that they don't see about themselves - and vice versa.

One moment I may be the object of your thought, and in the next the reverse may be true. In any case, we are both objects of God's thought.

When I'm not sure. The reason for it is that it is possible to know a person very well and yet NOT be able to think of them objectively. For instance, if your girlfriend is manipulative and you resent her for it, you don't really see her when you look at her, you just see the sense of injustice she produces in you.

No, because He has not the need for an external source to see by that we do.

We all have a "third eye", if you will; but what good are eyes without light?

Actually, I misunderstood your question - He can say that. He is aware of His existence, just not by the same means that we are.

I would say yes. Again, a person can look at you without seeing you, in which case you can't be the object of his thought or perception.

I think so. For instance, bad posture is a superficial thing, but it is indicative of something wrong inside.

Again, your example presupposes perfect self-knowledge on your part. Even if you aren't hiding anything, I may be able to see a good quality about you that you are unaware of.

Only if you assume that self-awareness for the Creator is had through similar means as we use.

But not without light.

But that isn't necessarily self-observation. Ever heard of paralysis through analysis? That is, being so caught up in your mental machinery that you forget where you are?

Of course.

This is almost all intuitive.

That's the point of being here - to see if people can find logical flaws in my thinking.

While there is technically an infinitude of possibilities either way, that is deceptive. Imagine a container that holds an infinite number of chips, each stamped with a unique integer. Your odds of drawing an odd-numbered chip are 1 in 2, and your odds of drawing a multiple of 5 are one in 5; but your odds of drawing any particular number are infinite.

No, because neither of them really tells you anything.

Perhaps you could cite the best example you know of.

However, there is a bit of a problem, because the God whom Moses conversed with I believe to have been Christ, the image of the invisible God - not the Father.

I'm not saying they're unproblematic, I'm saying they're not descriptions.

Not really.

See my answer above.

Not so much illegitimate as meaningless.

I'm not into cold-calling. If someone asked, I'd answer his questions just the way I'm answering yours. Everybody has different preconceptions, so there is no formula.

Of course, I'm not trying to impart meaning to the word "God" anyway. I'm mainly trying to get people to consider the possibility that He exists.