God is a machine

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God is a machine

I often wonder why reality is something and not just an infinite nothingness, leaving me feeling in a state as if the whole thing is agitated and wants to become. Because this is at the root of the ‘condition of reality’, there will be something simple by which it works. Something more akin to function than to anything as patently complex as thought.

If it doesn’t have being it has that which becomes our being.

Why a machine and not simply a function or principle which generates the universe? Nature uses forces from nowhere [e.g. centrifugal etc] and things act by that. You take a stone on a string, and there is nothing about that nor the space it is in, which >is< centrifugal force, then also things like gravity is made by the mass of objects [and can probably be generated with graviton emitters], and mathematical patterns are also used or generated in the third party. Hence there are principles and function multiplied by further often generated principles and function, = all being made utility of in the third person = God/reality at base, is a machine.

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A godless universe would be as minimal as possible. It would be nothing but entropy and decay.
A created universe would seem to be created. It would work. It would be large if that god were powerful.
If the god was weak, it would not be able to create many things.

Even creating a single star would take a massive amount of force.

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I’m on page 16 of a study on Justus Lipsius

“A Classicist under Constraint: Justus Lipsius and the Revival of Stoic Determinism in the De Constantia” by Peter I. Osorio (the scholar, not the renegade cow tipper in Waycliffe, who causes the farmers so many problems).

He hits your issue head on, but I haven’t seen evidence that he is tackling Neo-Platonist issues regarding that things can be principles like St. Augustus does, such as mathematics being the evidence of the thoughts of God.

You seem to of been straddling these two classical schools as of late.

google.com/search?q=a+class … e&ie=UTF-8

I believe the PDF is the first link.

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But the maths don’t fit together [geometry fractions etc]? If God > the maths or order et al, then the maths or order of any kind would be directive and fit together to comprise the sapce. Whereas reality uses maths where ever it fits [in the third party].

Did the stoic’s have a similar concept – principles and utility = a machine? As if to say there is a ‘creation engine’, even if there is a god [because he would have a means to how he creates?].

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Sorta, they went deeper than that, in terms of apocylptic cycles and faith.

I need to point out not all Stoics were on board Zeno’s Physics , it was a outgrowth of Cynicism abd some only embraced the ethics and some logical aspects of Stoicism, leaving Cynicism at the same time as Zeno as part of a reform movement. But much of classic Stoicism believed strongly in a mechanistic universe govern by fate. The position of what made something good or evil depends on the era (the philosophy went everywhere in the west, not just christian/pagan rome and greece) and could contradict at times depending on the era and argument, but on the whole did think everything in the universe effected everything else, that everything had a reason, and these reasons occurred in this larger mechanical dialectic.

Here, it is brief:

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoic_physics

If you Google some of the terms, my posts on this site pop up.

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You’re not making any sense. Talk normal.

Not even a mathematician would understand this!

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He is viewing the discontuity between pure mathematics as a perfect system and the messy scientific results of observation Trixie.

Go out on a 15 mile hike, and look at a steep hill… estimate quickly the height in your head. Then look at it again carefully… the more tired you get, the more likely you are to overestimate the inclination of the hill by 15°. It has been theorized this is a adaptation to make us lazier, so we don’t waste endless energy brazengly going up hill.

Or… hold in your urine, then go out for a five mile run, and come back… you will find your pissing yourself slightly as you approach your house and toilet thinking relief is coming, it can’t wait… yet you were able to hold it prior… purely psychosomatic.

Likewise getting too tired to carry on when near the finish, premature ejaculation in mere proximity. Zeno’s space paradoxes… humans do all sorts of oddities in regards to mathematics, doesn’t add up to our presumptions often.

Our presumptions are as much something we rationally create as nature provides for. We can’t escape from this, but can become aware of it. Cicero tackled the irregularities of abstract, imaginary space in his mnemonics… we imagine say… a space from our memory, either real or made up… and walk through it. What we think we see is informed by expectations, a non-visual memory… what we actually see often doesn’t match up. Solipism has many irregularities to it, as would a simulated universe. Matrix got around this by not denying it, but offering a way out. Gnostics usually (99% of the time, minus some forum Gnostic here who insisted otherwise due to the peculiar twist his sect had to offer) reject this world. They seek a better world completely out of space and time.

Given this topic and my mention of Augustine, it should be noted he was often bombarded by rather ignorant pagans asking why God choose, if he was eternal… to build the universe Ex Nihilo in this particular space, and not somewhere else, or why this particular time, and not another point.

Pagans then and science now, like many Christians, are quite aware space and time started from the same point, and always was linked by some sort of relativism (though not necessarily Einstein’s take). He had to deal with idiot skeptics who thought the universe existed independent of space and time! We still deal with these mouth breathers to this day, I had to remind some Nietzschean on this forum a while back that Christians didn’t think in the mindset they were abscribing us as thinking in, with God “In” the universe… why can’t we find or prove him. That was never a possibility within Christian theology, by our original default. Our sciences are material, looking at physics. You can’t prove God existed anymore than you can prove what existed before the big bang or beyond the innards of a black hole.

Mental constructs of pure mathematics don’t always match up.

These are some of the oldest debates in philosophy. You find them hidden in countless threads across this forum piecemeal… few philosophies exist in the west that doesn’t touch upon them in some way.

(I never prematurely ejaculated. Wish I could though, would save me time).

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Tf

nice post.

I never realised I was stoic. How unstoic. :slight_smile:

I think there is a more precise way to say all that [in the link];

draw one circle and place one kind of thing in it e.g. a lathe, then add another circle and add another thing in it e.g. a lump of wood, now place them together + add function, and you get a chair. i.e. from two reals you get a third real. So you can keep dividing and there is never a deficit, there are no non-reals produced.

As for ‘divine fire’; there are probably no reals +/or unreals, as the classifications pertain to appearances. Take for instance a very overly literal the journey of/to buddhahood; there is an assumption that we are unreal or otherwise ‘illusion’ and can be made real, when 1, if there is no deficit no matter how much you divide + 2, if one thing can be fully categorised as unreal, and another as real, then there can be no interchange, the one cannot become the other by definition. There is equally the issue of something from nothing of course.

Or in short… there are only reals, and reals can transcend their own reality [from one thing into another e.g. shape] to become further reals.

The divine deity and engine must therefore equally be existentially real, that is to say, there there must be a functional existent reality which existent prior to existences, like the singularity before the plurality. …but that isn’t necessarily a ‘god’.

I would say that what we are is the same as the thing to wit we are comprised, but akin to the third circle ~ the chair and not the lathe nor the wood.

There are other observable similars of course, if we consider the colour quality of redness ~ is also a third circle manifest reality.

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It is a very right hemispheric centric outlook. As I said, issues pop up. That is why I took so much time deciphering Arius Didymus, trying to work out the various theories of how the mind works in it… text exists as a horribly broken paraphrase, like a car in a wreck… everything is there, just all scrunched up.

I think originally stoicism sat in a more lateralized position in the mind, especially in it’s ethics stage where various philosophers competed and completed one another’s ideas, and over time just drifted right at the same time the Platonic schools were breaking their orthodoxy and inducting ideas from other schools.

What we have as the various ancient schools now is a continuity mess. Your looking at a middle stage for Stoic development, something lazy professors are willing to cheerleader as the authentic. It is in a great sense, they aren’t illegitimate, but it ignores the older and disregards the medieval, renaissance and modern. It is a organically adapting philosophy, starts to resemble the minds of it’s greatest thinkers in every era.

I do think you would well enjoy this era of thought though. Just would recommend holding off on claiming your a Stoic till you see the ethical and logical systems… that matters more than the physics. If you hold strictly with the physics, you end up clashing with Jerome Cardan and his break with Astrology, and the exploration of statistics. A lot of professors today are completely oblivious to the insights of history not mentioned in philosophy 101, and will think you absurd for claiming your a Stoic and yet learning how to adapt more modern understandings into it.

It was a very fine system in it’s day, for a Cynic impressed with Stoicism, I had little issue embracing it… but I can more easily adapt modern psychological concepts to it given my background in various theories of how neurology and personality works… Stoics did this themselves so I can claim orthodox actions here not out of the norm, and debate the same old concerns while introducing new twists. Most can’t.

You, living in the UK, need to be aware the latest Stoic revival started in the 80s. One of the co-leaders of the London Philosophy Group is a Stoic, but you Aldo have some wacky neo-pagan cults thinking Stoicism is inherently incompatible with Christianity (certainly isn’t, new testament even used Stoic language)… it is a absolute morass in the UK, the pagans are leaning towards a new religion on it. We have similar groups here in the US, but the population here isn’t as scared of religious diversity given our freedom of religion, so it turns into meetups and barbeques… and many aren’t in forcing the no Christian Stoic rule as much given most Stoics in the US are well educated Christians. So the UK has a retarded intellectual civil war coming.

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there are reasons why i don’t usually say i am this or that, or why i don’t follow a given philosopher or school. i think you just outlined them. :slight_smile:

i don’t get why battles or adherance is required at all.

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Oh… cause philosophy is never enough for the philosopher.

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With you here - feels like this to me also. Where do we begin to find order in the chaos? :slight_smile: If our reality can be explained by an equation… in my mind we are some subset of this equation - parts of a whole. Guess I’ll try to go to bed soon and try to live another fairly normal day

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I think there is some simple equation at root too.

I think there are many re-categorisations required before man knows what that is…
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=190711

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There is no flag. Computer, all too computer!

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Very simply not to worry, the sceptics of old operated on another set of rules. Between the very old and the very modern, say 1000 years, a new dawn is being born, where enlightenment is not merely as Descartes evil genius would portend the man in the machine, but the dawn of the new god,
seeks to elevate man, into his common humanism, where the mere fact that the man as god always existed, he never knew himself not to exist, leans on the more convincing show, that nature takes pleasure in observing, experiencing itself through the most refined machine as of yet, the humam brain.

Without the brain, nothing really would exist, since existence is esse est percipii. Therefore, neither the artificial brains, the emulations as mere extensions could claim that they were part of the real thing

And so is it also with God, who is perhaps the Grand daddy of all grander memory’s till, banks of all time, banks where mass and energy know no meaning of what it means to create
Or to be created. It is merely an input output system where beginning and end are simultaneous and dependent systems.

The god of apprehensionis and worried god fearful of the skeptics, and the faithless because they develop energies demanding systems of input output separate , not even an overlap can exist there, therefore no function of one in terms of the other. There simply is no existence, life, miracles,or redemption there.

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We are unpretentiously resonating.

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I thought God was a DJ? :-k Faithless said so, but they also said that they wanted more, so who knows :confusion-shrug: