A Non-Violent Solution?

[genkaus]

Can you please strive to be a little more concise? It's getting a bit tedious to find every little fault in your argument. Especually since they are being repeated ad nauseum.

I never claimed that it wouldn't be phenomenological. All I have ever claimed is that it wouldn't necessarily be restricted to the very limited picture of "phenomenon" that you are restricting your philosophy to.

If it is phenomenological, it is not independent of spacetime - whatever form of spacetime it may be.

And besides, the argument for "The God of the Gaps" is actually a term that applies to creationists who argue against evolution based on the idea that there are 'gaps' in our understanding of evolution.

I totally agree that those kinds of arguments are totally unwarranted. Mainly because the 'gaps' in our knowledge of evolution are indeed small, and decrease daily. Evolution is basically proven beyond a reasonable doubt as far as I'm concerned.

So the "God of the Gaps" idea doesn't even apply to the concept of spirit that I'm talking about.

It applies to any concept that is presented as being possibly true simply based on absence of concrete knowledge on it. Also known as argumentum ad ignoratiam.

Moreover, I'm not suggesting that just because we don't know everything that his means that a spiritual essence of reality must be true.

On the contrary, all I have ever claimed at any point is that it can't be ruled out.

You're argument is that you claim that it can be ruled-out.

And that is the only thing that I have ever been addressing with you.

And I stand firm in my position, un-wavered by your claims. Because your claim simply don't apply to the spiritual philosophies that I'm considering.

And as far as I'm concerned I've made a solid case for that already.

If there can be such a concept as "ruling out", then it can be ruled out.

The concept is simple. If there is such a thing as spiritual essence to reality, then the law of identity would not apply to it. In that case, it can be self-contradictory, i.t it can be something and not be it simultaneously. Which means, nothing can ever be "ruled-out" or "ruled-in" and all theories are equally true and false, since there is no objective reality to determine any truth by.

See, there you go again attempting to use totally false erroneous arguments that can't be applied. This time your appealing to the truly futile semantic approach. Now you're going to try to argue that semantically these terms must necessarily be restricted to our previous classical intuitive views if they are to have any meaning to us at all.

No, I'm trying to show you using semantics that your argument is hollow. You said, "if one could imagine such an existence, it could possibly exist". But asking someone to imagine it is like asking them to imagine a circle that is not round or to imagine the color red that is blue.

That is a totally empty argument devoid of anything but self-delusion.

Semantic arguments are quite useful against meaningless ideas.

We are forced to use words from our existence vocabulary because those are the only terms that we understand. But our grossly limited semantic language cannot be used as an argument to place limitations on what the true nature of reality must be.

Semantics represents the current limit on the reach of of your mind. When humans identify a concept, they denote it with a word which form then on becomes its representation, irrespective of whether that concept is about something real or imagined. That is the limit of your knowledge and your imagination.

Any claim, made on anything beyond that, is making a claim beyond your reach. it doesn't matter whether the claim is about what is or what is possible, that claim is like attempting to move beyond your limit, while staying within it. I'm trying to show you that any such attempt is self-defeating.

Concepts that couldn't possible be?

Concepts that couldn't possibly be independent of spacetime. I was hoping that was understood.

There's the flaw in your extremely limited thinking right there.

We already have scientific reasons to believe that there already exists concepts and behaviors of "realty" that we may very well have extreme problems wrapping our limited minds around.

Steven Weinberg says it quite elegantly, "We have no guaranteed that the true nature of reality must be explainable in a way that makes theoretical physicists happy"

And the same is true of philosophers.

All you're basically doing is demanding that the true nature of reality must fit your personal limited way of thinking to make you happy. And therefore you can rule out anything that you deem would make you unhappy.

That's ridiculous.

Processing:
Irrelevant rambling: ignored.
Argumentum ad verecundiam: ignored.
Argumentum ad hominem: ignored.
Searching: Relevance to the argument made.
Found: none.

That has always been my stance from the get-go. Although it's almost incorrect to call it a different kind of "space-time". It's simply a different structure altogether. Concepts such as space and time may not even be valid concepts in that other structure.

Either it is a different form of space-time or it is not. If it is not, then it cannot be phenomenological. Thus it cannot contain any consciousness.
Your attempts to subvert and equivocate between meanings of space-time and structure are irrelevant.

So what could we even mean by structure you may ask?

Well, the existence of information period. The existence of information implies that there must be some for of structure even if the information itself is that structure. There are scientific reasons to believe that in the underlying quantum world that gives rise to what we call "spacetime", there must necessarily exist information.

And the existence of information implies some form of structure at some level.

So (based on our limited semantic terms) we can conclude that, if spirit exists, it must have some form of structure, but not necessarily in terms of space and time as we perceive it.

Maybe it's some other form that we can't even begin to comprehend. In fact, that precisely the premise or axiom that is at the heart of Eastern Mysticism. The axiom that whatever exists as the underlying mystical nature of reality is indeed, most likely beyond our ability to comprehend in terms of what we consider to be 'reasonable'.

There it is.

There is the crucial stage where you divorce yourself from science and teeter off to mystical irrationality. There is the subtle jump here, possible only by gross disregard for any semantics, that allows you to present irrational arguments seemingly supported by scientists.

Information is not the same as consciousness.

In layman's terms, the word information is intricately tied to consciousness. To a layman, information, without any consciousness there to "know" it, is meaningless. To him, words on a paper hold meaning if and only if there is a consciousness which is aware of them - otherwise, it is simply ink on paper. So when a person hears that scientists believe there is "information" at quantum level, they naturally assume that there must be consciousness at that level too, since without it, the concept of information is meaningless.

While, in fact, quantum information has nothing to do with any consciousness. It doesn't even mean the same thing that "information" means in everyday language. The scientific meaning of information (usually referred to as physical information, of which quantum information is a type), has nothing to do with the everyday meaning. In that context information simply means structure.

Do you get that? Information means structure and scientists use "information" instead of structure because the latter has strong spatio-temporal implications. Equivocating between the two meanings and making a fallacious jump so big as to find a reason for propounding irrational philosophy, is not something that even eastern mysticism is guilty of.

Well, at least we've made some progress.

The only difficulty I have with what you just said here is that you're basically applying what you believe to know about our current spacetime configuration and just pushing that onto any other possible 'spacetime' configuration.

That's where we part ways.

I'm not prepared to restrict other possible forms of structure and/or information to the same things we believe to know about our current apparent situation.

Clearly this spacetime fabric appears to have evolved from a "Big Bang" into what it is today, and may continue to evolve into who-knows-what?

But that kind of linear time may itself be a temporal illusion.

Perhaps a structure or information that exists in some other form has no dependence on 'time' as well perceive time to be. And the whole idea that this information had to 'evolve' from a lesser state into a more complex state may be a totally misplaced concept.

All you're doing is assuming that since our spacetime universe appears to have evolved from an apparently non-conscious state of existence to a state where parts of it appear to have miraculously evolved into a state of awareness, that this should be true of any possible aspect of reality.

But where's the basis for that conclusion?

Moreover, where's the basis for ruling out that nothing else is even possible?

The basis is that 1) Structure - commonly referred to by scientists as information, has nothing to do with consciousness and 2) Within any structure that is not spatio-temporal, there is no consciousness possible.

I'm not suggesting that spirit "must exist" just because I can imagine scenarios under which it could exist.

Actually, you can't.

All I'm doing is saying that it's totally false information for anyone to claim that such scenarios can be absolutely ruled out, and that this conclusion "must be accepted".

No, this conclusion must be figured out on one's own. I cannot bear the burden of rationality on behalf of someone else.

That's simply nothing more than someone's personal opinion. It doesn't hold water in the bigger picture. It represents nothing more than a demand that we must all think in the same limited scope of the person who is claiming to have such a "proof".

No such "proof" exists.

Just because you are incapable of understanding the argument does not mean that no proof exists.

All that exists are people who, unlike Steven Weinberg, believe that the true nature of reality must satisfy their philosophical and/or theoretical desire to believe that their theories are right, thus making them happy.

Reality has not obligation to satisfy anyone's desires.

However, if your philosophy was correct, reality would have such an obligation. The hallmark of rationality is having desires in accordance with reality and the hallmark of irrationality is to desire something that has not basis in reality. Guess which one are you.