Actual Infinities

[robvalue]

If Allah can only hear prayers that focus on Mecca, that would seem to make him rather less than all powerful.

If he can hear them anyway, he is just forcing people to do stuff for the sake of it. See how much silly shit they will do.

He probably can't hear anything with all this death metal grunge music or whatever it is that the kids are all playing these days.

[Mudhammam]

If he can hear them anyway, he is just forcing people to do stuff for the sake of it. See how much silly shit they will do.

Imam al-Ghalazi, a Sufi and learned scholar in Islamic juriprudence, has got your questions covered, Rob:

Remedies for the body effectively procure health because of a property in them which men endowed with intellect cannot perceive by virtue of their intellectual resources, but rather it must be the object of blind obedience to the physicians who learned it from the prophets, who, because of the special attribute of prophecy, came to know the special properties of things. In a similar fashion it became necessarily evident to me that the reason for the effectiveness of the remedies of the acts of worship, with their prescriptions and determined quantities ordained by the prophets, cannot be perceived by means of the intellectual resources of men endowed with intellect. On the contrary, they must be the object of blind obedience to the prophets who perceived those qualities by the light of prophecy, not by intellectual resources. Moreover, just as medicaments are composed of mixtures of elements differing in kind and quantity, some of them being double others in weight and quantity, and just as the difference of their quantities is not without a profound significance pertaining to the kind of the properties, so, likewise, the acts of worship, which are the remedies of hearts, are composed of actions differing in kind and quantity, so that a prostration is the double of a bowing, and the morning prayer is half as long as the afternoon prayer. This difference is not without a profound significance which pertains to the kind of the properties knowable only by the light of the prophecy. Very stupid and ignorant would be the man who would wish to discover in them a wisdom by means of reason, or who would suppose that they had been mentioned by chance, and not because of a profound divine significance in them which requires them to be such because of the special property in them. And just as in medicaments there are basic elements which are their chief ingredients and additional substances which are their complements, each of them having a special effect on the workings of their basic elements, so, likewise, supererogatory prayers and customary practices are complements for perfecting the effects of the principal elements of the acts of worship.

Got it? Don't seek to understand, just obey.

[robvalue]

Ah, right! How stupid I was to try and use my brain. God gave it to me as a test, to see if I'd act like I didn't have one.

[Neo-Scholastic]

Nestor, you wonder if universals arise as an artifact of the mind as part of a naming process. (Hopefully I got that right). Clearly some of that happens. Sophisticated artificial neural networks have demonstrated the ability to recognize and sort objects into useful categories based on observable features. No one I know believes computers form actual concepts in any meaningful way, not yet anyway. To be sure, people define man-made artifacts according to arbitrary sets of accidental properties and assigned functions. I can sit in a rocker, on five-gallon bucket, or in a bean bag and call them all furniture based on a function relative to human need. And we can divide people into demographic categories without any biological basis. At the same time, the threat of post-modernists painting reality as just a social construct should be enough to closely scrutinize whether that notion tells the whole story.

I don’t think attaching names to clusters of properties works for every condition. In some cases clusters of properties revolve around a common nature somehow responsible for the clustering. I think this happens with respect to natural physical objects like Men, or substances like water. People abstract observable features from physical objects to form a generic mental construct such as bipedal, opposable thumbs, rationality, etc. Experience also teaches people that a clear liquid that boils, freezes, and quenches thirst justifies calling it water. Here I think the Principle of Sufficient Reason compels us to wonder why such specific properties of cluster together and attribute a common essential nature responsible for that clustering. Natural science has revealed at least a few such instances. Each species of living organism, like Man, has its own distinct genetic structure that limits how any particular member gets expressed. The properties of water reflect an essential chemical structure, H2O. Someone could argue that these ‘common natures’ actually represent a deeper level of clustering, but I would reply that the common nature of the macro-level depends necessarily on the common natures of objects at micro-levels.

In my earlier post (and contrary to a position I took way back), I implied that treating existence as its own distinct property may not serve any useful purpose and could actually mislead.* I think we should concern ourselves more about whether it is possible to separate subjective artificial distinctions (invented) from objectively knowable externals (discovered) and less about what the fundamental stuff ‘is’. For example, did scientists invent or discover electrons? Likewise, did Aristotle invent or discover the Principle of Non-Contradiction? Even though electrons have so-called material properties (like charge) and the PNC has a formal one, a person can recognize both as objective features of reality. Electrons have a causal effect, but so does the PNC to the extent that it limits how reality works.

[Edwardo Piet]

Ah, right! How stupid I was to try and use my brain. God gave it to me as a test, to see if I'd act like I didn't have one.

Finally! You FINALLY get it! That's using your brain. Oh fuck... you're trapped.

You used your brain to finally get the fact that you're not supposed to use it and now you just fucked yourself.

(Not to worry I fuck myself all the time).