Nine principles (metaphysics)

Nine principles

Principle I.

All that exists is either the effect of an antecedent cause, or is causeless.

Principle II.

All that exists is one substance in a multitude of conditions and forms.

Principle III.

God and the universe are, in fact one. That is, God and the universe are one substance.

Principle IV.

Natural law, that is, the operational laws of the universe, and the will of God, are one.

Principle V.

All that exists does so according to necessity, which is the fulfillment of natural law or the will of God, and could not fail to exist or exist otherwise than it does. likewise, all that exists is determined and made necessary by natural law/ the will of God, and is caused, meaning that each current condition is the effect of some number of antecedent causes.

Principle VI.

The procession of causes and effects constitute the evolutionary history of the universe, or, the revelation of the will of God.

Principle VII.

The evolutionary process of the universe moves according to a system of interactions which operate according to cause and effect, and from which new conditions arise that in turn interact and produce new conditions according to the same operations.

Principle VIII.

The manifest tendency of the universe is to structure, order, functionality, life, and intelligence. This is seen in the natural movement to structure and order in all things in the universe, to the movement to functionality is the various systems in the universe, to the movement to various kinds of life within systems, and to the movement of various kinds of intelligence within living things.

Principle IX.

In the manifest tendency of the universe being towards structure, order, life, and intelligence, according to multiple cause and effect interactions, it may be seen that future conditions will build upon past conditions, and that the traits listed above will remain and build upon one another according to necessity. Today’s structures, orders, lives, and intelligences will be superseded by tomorrows.

JVS

nice metaphysics… none of it provable or necessarily valid, but nice metaphysics… (gottfried and george appreciate getting their props)

-Imp

I wonder if one could have certainty that Hume would best Spinoza in a hot-dog eating competition?

LOL… hume would have no logical reason to eat…

-Imp

But suppose stars and bodies all die? And let us see how one being is at conflict with the other.

Perhaps ‘God’ is sick, and dieing, also?

Imp, I cannot engage is dialogue with you if you insist on speaking humean (pardon the by-word).

An organs are cells, cells are molecules, molecules are atoms, atoms are particles, etc. The world is an aggregate of parts composed of one polymorphic substance.

God plus universe introduces untold problems. God including universe resolves untold problems (e.g. omnipresence, omniscience, omnipotence). However, such terms are impotent lest all parties engaging in dialouge are theists.

Would God not reveal his (if you will pardon the assignment of gender) will in a way that does not include natural law? Is natural law then not under the sphere of Gods influnce or beyond his power to utilize? WHere else would such laws originate from?

I’m afraid that I do not understand your response.

The establishment of three and four paves the way for six which would logically follow from them.

Refer to any elementary science text.

Refer to physics, if indeed this is an actual response and not the utilization of eight as fodder for mocking humor.

physics? a compounding of errors taken as articles of faith…

-Imp

I will respond here with my council to jamesshrugged in the epistemology thread:

"Humean epistemological thought, when disentangled reveals itself to be a kind of solipsism, or even nihilism. Hume believed that there is no way for the mind to get beyond it’s sensory ‘impressions’ and the ‘ideas’ that they produce, and so, he believed that there is no rational reason to believe that an external world exists apart from our subjective experience of it.

How does one disprove such a position? How does one get beyond oneself and ones experience of the world so as to prove that the world exists? It is impossible to disprove a negative, and so the very merit of the debate is dubious. Why do we feel compelled to pay any mind to such positions and, in paying them mind, validate them?"

"you can engage in whatever you like. but when you make unfounded assertions, I’ll illustrate them… "

-Imp

The others have their own problems, some (as rightly identified) are simply problems a certain Cartesian Jewish man’s ideas have encountered. All I can say is that Principle IX is excluded my the Second Law of Thermodynamics. I am afraid this prinicple is just wrong given thermodynamic observation… unless you know something no one else does).

Very good principles. In contrast to BlueChicken above, I especially like Principle IX which posits the universe has a tendency towards ever higher “structure, order, life, and intelligence”. This idea seems to go against the law of entropy, and not only that, the idea of evolution having a built-in direction towards greater complexity and intelligence is a no-no in standard Darwinism as well (mutation is “blind”). Regardless, I think this idea is correct… There’s room to grow in evolutionary theory. :smiley:

Only the last two seem no to be directly copied from Spinoza.

“The second law of thermodynamics is an expression of the universal law of increasing entropy. In simple terms, it is an expression of the fact that over time, differences in temperature, pressure, and density tend to even out in a physical system that is isolated from the outside world. Entropy is a measure of how far along this evening-out process has progressed.”

Differences being evened out strikes me as a process of balancing, ordering, structuring,and ordering.

JVS

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law … scriptions

"Entropy change has often been defined as a change to a more disordered state at a molecular level. In recent years, entropy has been interpreted in terms of the “dispersal” of energy. "

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy

I am not sure about the ‘room to grow’, let me try to explain without stepping on many toes:

Basically, entropy is the progression towards molecular ‘chaos’ (for lack of a better term) within a closed system. Earth, alas, is not a closed system receiving heat from the Sun and thus remains a bad example for entropy on a understandable scale. The Big Freeze argument for the fate of the universe captures it better: all of the galaxies of the universe are gradually moving apart from eachother (and entities within these galaxies are moving away from eachother, etc.) and will continue to do so until the universe has spread out to the point of a very dispersed cloud of particles (which will break down from there into energy). Although the Big Freeze argument is a hypothesis and will only be proven/disproved in 30 billion years (approx) it stands out as the most accepted theory proposed within the scientific community at this time (oh God, uncredited appeals to authority… Bad Me!), and hinges on the second law of thermodynamics.

“Spontaneous changes tend to smooth out differences in temperature, pressure, density, and chemical potential that may exist in a system, and entropy is thus a measure of how far this smoothing-out process has progressed.”
(en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy)

This is the one that gets me as I ascribe to an infinite universe, thus a change towards a balancing out of pressure with no volume constraints would lead to a pressure of 0 (everything spreads out to an infinite distance, nothing ‘bumps’ into anything else thus no outward force). Thus in response to the claim of the 9th Principle, the universe DOES NOT tend towards order on the universal scale.

In other words, entropy increases globally, but order, complexity, and intelligence can (and do) increase locally, as evidenced by planet Earth.

jeremiah175 wrote:

Pantheism’s view of life is logical, with God being an impersonal set of laws. It would help if we both knew and realized the laws governing the evolution of consciousness. Perhaps then many of us could actually be happy or simply in harmony with our own individual spark of the higher will of God. The reference or starting point lies in numbers, which qualitatively are symbols of consciousness. The concept that numbers are the pathway to God has set countless philosophers on their way to self-transformation. In ancient times, philosophy WAS religion, and number lay at the heart of it, with Pythagoras, Lao Tzu and other pantheists in the last age of enlightenment (about 600 BC) showing that philosophy lay beyond mere belief and was therefore incomprehensible to the masses. What the ancient sages taught was rejected then, and will always be rejected by academics and religionists. Without a reference point in mathematics, which implies a potential outcome of peace, happiness, health and love via orderliness and harmony, we have so many philosophers’ minds running off the rails, like Nietszche’s.

Luxin,

In addition to the PM I sent you, I thought you (and others) might find this
interesting:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organisation

Yes, thank you. We are here to decipher the ways of Nature as well as enjoy its beauty. The bible mentions “the keys to the kingdom”, which i interpret to mean a mathematical key. Beauty at any level must evolve and that evolution must be orderly, and the same throughout the universe. Aliens are only science fiction; an orderly universe implies that we – the only ones who evolve consciously – are the ultimate creatures.

There has to be an orderly, mathematical basis for the development of all self-organizing systems, that is systems that function perfectly regardless of whether we understand how they do or not.

Of course computer systems were included. Computers depend on the Hz vibrations of silicon chips, the seemingly most common being:

2^13 = 8192 Hz

and powers of 2 above and below it. These powers of 2 vibrations of material things are reflections of consciousness or what could be called Divine existing on the same matter-consciousness continuum. I consider the operations of computers to be a harmonic reflection of the Divine within and based on silicon. Their binary system of bits either on or off is based on powers of 2.

But it’s how consciousness evolves from 1 to 9 that could change the quality of life on this planet rather dramatically…

“logically, there is no cause and effect, merely an apparent constant conjunction of events…”

  • I’ve seen this stated before in philosophy, but I’m unconvinced. The laws of gravity and science don’t seem to have any necessary grounding either, but they consistently operate for some reason (Principle IV?)

The second law of thermodynamics is well noted and I do think that most of the universe operates in such a way; however, it is theorized that life, especially human life, arises from negative entropy.

Principle V seems to argue for a strict determinism; I think that indeed we have been determined in some sense, but due to free will some have also had the ability to deviate from God’s will.

as was kant… but if there is something more than a apparent constant conjunction of events, it has yet to appear…

-Imp