(December 19, 2010 at 9:09 am)Captain Scarlet Wrote: No I don't agree, how would you recognise complexity without pre-existing simplicity?
By comparing the thing being examined to the definition of complexity, a composite of interrelated parts, or something to that effect - There is no need for a reference to simple.
You are proposing that you cannot understand what complex is without a simplicity to compare it to, but that would also make it true that you can only determine something to be simple relative to something that is complex - You could just as easily say that simple things cannot exist before complex things because nothing is simple without being judged relative to something that is complex.
The only way to avoid that paradox is if the definitions are descriptive and not relative to each other.
Quote: It is a comparitive quality. Qualities are qualities of something and sentience is a complex quality of extant beings. Qualities require means and the means to sentience necessitates a causal relationship between the means and the sentience.
It can be used as a comparison relative to something that is more or less complex or simple relative to something else, but it is it's self a description and not a comparison - I've pointed out the paradox you run into with that line of thinking.
Quote:As for gods properties, I don't feel an onus to prove atemporal beings cannot act dynamically? The law of causality would make that axiomatically true as all effects are preceeded (in time) by their causes. If that is to be a successful rejoinder then a rough sketch of how an atemporal being acts dynamically is needed, and I don't feel that i'm being incredulous asking for it.
That's a really good point as far as an atemporal god is concerned - If a god was atemporal then he exists in his current state indefinitely, he cannot motion to change the current state of affairs as change in thought necessarily realises a different state of affairs, and that is two moments. An atemporal existence is necessarily a single moment therefore an atemporal God could not have created the universe - Are we on the same page? I think we have slightly different ways of looking at it.
But again not all concepts of God are atemporal.
However, an acausal (and not atemporal) god would then necessarily have to began existing with time(his own or ours) because he necessarily couldn't have existed in a moment before time as those are two states of affairs, making it something that he can neither create nor control. If that is true then omnipotence isn't possible for this being as he wouldn't have the power to control his own temporal experience.
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