On Hell and Forgiveness

[polymath257]

On the contrary, I have studied these things most of my adult life (and i am 55 years old). You are simply wrong in claiming that no rational person sees the number 4 as subjective.

Let's ask this: are language constructs 'objective' under your definition? It seems that they are, which in turn says that your definition is faulty. Language constructs certainly *shouldn't* be objective, even if they are independent of any particular person.

Language is subjective. The concept of 4 objects is the very opposite of subjective. It is more than three and less than 5. Never any different. Would have the same meaning in all possible languages, all corners of the universe and would have the same meaning in all possible worlds (as in possible world semantics used in modal logic claims). If these facts are true, it follows necessarily that the concept of 4 objects is not just a language construct and has an entirely separate ontological status. 

And once again, and for the reasons I gave, I disagree. The number 4 as it appears in the positive integers is not the same as that for real numbers, and is not the same as what can be applied to certain aspects of the real world.

The number 4 is ultimately a language construct. It is part of a formal language, say Peano arithmetic.

The problem comes when you attempt to define what it means to be 'physical'. Are photons physical? Are neutrinos? How about dark matter? Dark energy? In all cases, I would say definitely yes, they are physical. But why? The only separating property is that they interact with things we previously accepted as physical. This is what allows them to be measured and analyzed. And that is what makes them physical.

The mind being physical just goes along with this realization. But, we can go much, much farther. No new physics is required to explain the workings of the mind. EVERYTHING is based on patterns of neural firing. That much is quite clear from what we have learned about the brain and the mind. In the exact same way that a running compute rprogram is a physical process, the mind is a physical process of the brain.

Define physical? objects subject to the laws of nature (deterministic). Conscious reasoning and a decision to act seem the very opposite of deterministic. Non-physical consciousness is not only plausible, it is quite intuitive. We experience the thing every minute that you are denying. A computer program is a bad analogy because computer programs do not think about something and then decide something based on preference or altruism or aesthetics or moral concerns or moods or all of these or none of these. Your conclusion that there is nothing non-physical in the universe is not only unproven, but may actually be unlikely. 

First, you will get into circularity problems when you then attempt to define what it means to be a 'law of nature'. Not all laws of nature, for example, are deterministic. Again, quantum mechanics provides the best counter-example.

And from what we have found from our studies of the brain, the computer analogy is quite good. The 'experience' is that of the brain systems, pure and simple.

Sorry, but htis is simply wrong. Science is quite possible without a notion of causality. All that is required is correlation and observation of such as patterns.

Wow. Do you realize that reality would not even hold together without what we call 'causality.' You cannot even conceive of a world without the causal principle if you tried. Stating that science does not need a notion of causality is...just...wow. Do you understand that in order to interpret reality, you need a metaphysical system in which to process the inputs. Perhaps this will help:

Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that studies the essence of a thing. This includes questions of being, becoming, existence, and reality.[1] The word "metaphysics" comes from the Greek words that literally mean "beyond nature". "Nature" in this sense refers to the nature of a thing, such as its cause and purpose. Metaphysics then studies questions of a thing beyond or above questions of its nature, in particular its essence or its qualities of being. Metaphysics seeks to answer, in a "suitably abstract and fully general manner", the questions:[2]

1. What is there?
   
   
2. And what is it like?
   

Topics of metaphysical investigation include existence, objects and their properties, space and time, cause and effect, and possibility.

Epistemological foundation[edit]

Like mathematics, metaphysics is a non-empirical study which is conducted using analytical thought alone. Like foundational mathematics (which is sometimes considered a special case of metaphysics applied to the existence of number), it tries to give a coherent account of the structure of the world, capable of explaining our everyday and scientific perception of the world, and being free from contradictions. In mathematics, there are many different ways to define numbers; similarly in metaphysics there are many different ways to define objects, properties, concepts, and other entities which are claimed to make up the world. While metaphysics may, as a special case, study the entities postulated by fundamental science such as atoms and superstrings, its core topic is the set of categories such as object, property and causality which those scientific theories assume. For example: claiming that "electrons have charge" is a scientific theory; while exploring what it means for electrons to be (or at least, to be perceived as) "objects", charge to be a "property", and for both to exist in a topological entity called "space" is the task of metaphysics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysics

While everything I pasted is very important, note the underlined section and the example that follows it. You not only blur the lines between science and metaphysics, you seem to just deny the function of metaphysics. 

Which, I might add, is why metaphysics tends to be *absolutely useless* for understanding anything about the real world. In order to get anything approaching real knowledge, you need to actually do observations. Just sitting and thinking isn't going to be close to enough. So, what tends to happen is that philosophers convince themselves they are doing something deep when they are actually doing non-sense.

Math, like I said, is a *language* and has enough expressibility to help us make models of our observations.

But I reject wholeheartedly that knowledge can be gained without observation. At best, you can get arbitrary definitions, but that doesn't lead to knowledge.

In NO way is metaphysics knowledge.

Classical causality is the averaging of the underlying randomness. When you have Avagadro's number of molecules adding their randomness together, it tends to average out.

That seems to be more of a footnote to the metaphysical principle of causality than some earth shattering change that reshapes our thinking. The principle for everyone except the quantum mechanic scientist is still the same.

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And that is enough to destroy the principle. The universe is ultimately quantum mechanical in nature. Whatever classical causality you see is because of the average of the quantum randomness.

And again, any *metaphysical* notion of causality is meaningless: without actual observation and testing it has no bearing on reality.