watertank | Entries tagged with god

Some scientists think that god is just one of your imaginary friends:

Improvised prayers triggered patterns that match those seen when people communicate with each other, and activated circuitry that is linked with the theory of mind - an awareness that other individuals have their own independent motivations and intentions (Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1093/scan/nsn050).

Two of the activated regions are thought to process desire and consider how another individual - in this case God - might react. Also activated were part of the prefrontal cortex linked to the consideration of another person's intentions, and an area thought to help access memories of previous encounters with that person.

Бога больше нет, поэтому народ выбирает себе в друзья поэтов и писателей. http://ivanov-petrov.livejournal.com/1149402.html танцоров, певцов и музыкантов нет. пока.

If people were chess pieces, they would ( over time ) develop a cult of personal sacrifice: those who give up their lives to achieve strategic victories are real heroes ( role models for other pieces).

This situation would be a control equivalent of FlatLand: a hand that moves the pieces must the hand of god/destiny/faith.

A grandfatherly gentlemen walks along the street followed by a crying ten- or eleven-year old boy. The gentlement is clearly annoyed by all this fuss. He stops, turns around and tells the boy:

- Your mother is trying to do what's good for the family. God is not going tolerate your complaints. He is not going tolerate fighting in the family. He is going to get upset and will take away all our money.

Philosophy 6: Man, God, and Society in Western Literature

1.1. In the beginning God created the conciousness and the void.
1.2. Now the consciousness was unformed and faceless, and no idea ever rippled its surface. And the spirit of God hovered over the void.
1.3. And God said: 'Let there be thought.' And there was thought.
1.4. And God saw the thought, that it was good; and God divided the thought from the nothingness.

A few thousand years ago an opening to a story like this one would inspire an absolute awe:

1. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 2. Now the earth was unformed and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters. 3 And God said: 'Let there be light.' And there was light.

The immenseness of the act must had been felt stunning to the people of that age. Just imagine - void earth, deep darkness, and all of a sudden light. Created at will. Out of nothing. Totally awesome.
But now? Not that impressive. So, what would God have to create today to equally impress a modern audience? What would be an event that would blow our minds away with an incomprehensible enormity?

In the beginning God created the Matrix. The Matrix was unformed and void, and no thought ever rippled its surface. And God said: Let there be consciousness .

No. Let's try this:

In the beginning God created the conciousness. And the consciousness was unformed and void, and no idea ever rippled its surface. And God said: Let there be thought.

just wanted to capture a thought that occurred to me on the dogwalk today...

computeres used to be people who performed coordinated computations by hand or with help of computational devices. this kind of computation could produce a game but the pace would be so slow that no human would want to play it. and even if we put together a large group of human computers it would be too expensive for somebody to use it for gaming. add to it communication and coordination issues.

when computers became mechanical and then electronic a new quality emerged - real-time response, which made human-computer interaction "synchronizable". thus we got games, i.e. a new quality that has nothing to do with compputation per se.

it's hard to deny that humans are capable of computing and/or communicating results. for example, when we get together in a movie theater we are programmed to produce certain emotions. or when we are exposed to a fiery political speech we often respond in unison. now, imagine somebody who is patient enough to wait for the response for a very long time, and/or for whom time moves a lot slower than for us. then, along the lines of the hitchiker's guide, we can imagine that a planetary-wide game is going on. to understand this game we need to roll the "movie" of human history back and forth, back and forth - the same way you could play-out old films that were printed on an actual "moving pictures" tape.
Is it possible to discover God this way? probably not. it would be too simple. but a new quality would possibly emerge. is it detectable somehow?

The idea was that the seal should bear a clear mark, identifying its owner. Like the clay envelopes studied by Schmandt-Bosserat, seals were instruments of economic control, guarteeing the supervision of proceedings, or confirming that a transaction had tken place. In practice, the Sumerians produced some very imaginative devices with which to identify owners: worshipping at a temple, procession of boats, prisoners efore a ruler, feedin of animals. The were, in effect pictographical signatures. Later, a new type of seal emerged, produced by cutting machines. This clearly suggsts that trade was increasing and that the need for identifying marks was likewise growing. ibid, p. 80.

It's very informative to see how much faith a transition from concrete to abstract requires from its participants. For example, the transition from a physical "clay" representation of animal count to the more abstract inscription on a clay tablet, representing this count, must bear a seal of a trusted person. Otherwise, how one is to know that the writing actually denotes what it writes about. No wonder, first mathematicians were priests. The belief in the abstract must be supported by either strong evidence delivered by science, or strong faith delivered by religion. Money, as an abstract representation of value, must bear the seal of a trustworthy government. God, as an abstract representation of higher powers, has to be supported by miracles of faith.
Also of note would be the emergence of abstract models where the scalability of operation is concerned.
cf: Aristotle's classification work.

But there was als a religious reason for Eridu. The city is was located on a small hill ringed by a depression, in which subterranean water collected. This surrounding area was never less than a swamp and in the rainy season formed a sizeable lake. It was thus a configuration that conformed neatly to Mesoptamian ideas of the Cosmos, which pictured the earth as a disc surrounded by a huge body of water. In mirroring this configuration, Eridu became a sacred spot. Petr Charvat says that Eridu was believed to containe the source of all wisdom and that it was the seat of the god of knowledge. He says the 'first ingelligible universal religion seems to have been born' in Eridu, in which worship involved the use of triad of colours ... Earthly existence was affirmed by the use of red, death by the use of black, and eternal life ( and purity) through white. Ideas: a history of thought and invention, by Peter Watson. p. 75

I wonder how it feels to create a religion, to realize for the first time that there's god of wisdom that lives in your neighbourhood.

Lord God, The Eternal One, is patient. He waits until once in a while those who can hear Him arise among the deaf.

update: evolution works pretty much the same way.

A thought-provoking book: God, a biography, by Jack Miles. Several years ago, on an intercontinental flight, I listened to its audio version, and back then it shifted my attitude toward God, as well as the Torah.
Now I am reading it again. The spell of discovery is gone, and I can see it logical flaws, inconsistencies, imperfections. Most importantly, Miles doesn't get the psychology of the Creator as a creator, the purposefulness of his existence.

The falsity of the Copernican system must not on any account be doubted, especially by us Catholics, who have the irrefragable authority of Holy Scripture interpreted by the greatest masters in theology, whose agreement renders us certain of the stability of the Earth and the mobility of the Sun around it. The conjectures of Copernicus and his followers offered to the contrary are all removed by that most sound argument, taken from the omnipotence of God. He being able to do in many, or rather in infinite ways, that whcih to our view and observation seems to be done in one particular way, we must not pretend to hamper God's hand and tenaciously maintain that in which we may be mistaken. And just as I deem inadequate the Copernican observations and conjectures, so I judge equally, and more, fallacious and erroneous those of Ptolemy, Aristotle, and their followers, when without going beyond the bounds of human reasoning their inconclusiveness can be very easily discovered.
Galileo Galilei, 1641. ( quoted from Galileo's Daughter, p. 359)

It's interesting to trace moments in the Torah where Lord God shows emotions. For example, the days of creation definitely make him feel good about what is going on on earth (e.g. Gen. 1.31). Remarkably, episodes with the forbidden fruit, expulsion of Man from Eden, and Qayin's crime leave him emotionally unaffected, as if everything comes as expected, or he doesn't attach too much significance to the events.

The next time Lord God shows his feelings is before the flood, when "And the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that all the impulse of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord repented that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart." (Gen. 6.5).

It appears that the original mission of Man was to produce individuals capable of subduing the earth. (Gen. 1.28).
For that only purpose God gave Mankind "every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, on which is the fruit yielding seed; to you it shall be for food."(Gen. 1.29).

Later God dropped the "subdue" requirement, probably, because he decided that Man, in order to survive, would have to learn it anyway. Or, it is also possible, God simply gave up on Man's ability to accomplish the original purpose of creation.

Why did he want Man to subdue the earth?

"What Jesus really contributed was a purification of the old Law through the elimination of those precepts that still required hatred for one's enemies, contempt for strangers, and vengeance for personal offenses."

The Life of Jesus, by Marcello Craveri. p. 187

cf. Buddha & Socrates (p 188).

Is it related to different stages of development, e.g. early survival vs distribution? The Hebrews of the early Torah had to separate themselves from the pagan world. The Hebrews of the diaspora and the early Christians had to cope with a much bigger world. It is much easier to create new connections with love, rather than formal interfaces.

useful or neutral outcome/function - good
harmful outcome/function - evil

useful wrt what?
harmful wrt what?

tradeoff vs core resolution. god's solutions gravitate toward the latter, human - toward the former.

examples?

It looks like, according to Torah, that the whole purpose of humanity is to figure out the most efficient way to use the Earth's resources while producing more and more humans. As if The Lord God was trying to figure out how many people can be sustained by the universe he created. So, the people that follows his/her rules have a competitive advantage in the marketplace of life.

The Lord God of Genesis acts as a genuine inventor/creator: he feels really good about his creation, but as soon as the very first Serpent walks in to kick the tires, the whole system breaks down.

Human, Adam's and Eve's that is, behavior defies any logic. For example, Adam and Eve live in Eden, they've got plenty of food, companionship and recreation. Are they content? No. They want to try something that is explicitly forbidden, and their only answer to "Why did you do that?", is "I don't know." Really? Of course not! The Serpent told Eve: your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil (Gen. 3.5)
And he was right. In one aspect, the ability to control their own procreation, Adam and Eve did become equal to God. But that was it! God's other ability, e.g. control the length of one's life (tree of life), remained beyond their reach. Another key ability - to provide for yourself and your offspring was also missing and had to be learned the hard way: in toil shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life (Gen 3.17). And as the result of this hard labor Adam and Eve are destined: return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken; for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.'(Gen. 3.19)

Conclusion: when you evaluate a control system, you need to be aware of all the functions that it orchestrates. Adam and Eve committed the most common inventor's mistake: focus on the Tool, rather than on the system as a whole. The obvious flaw in their thinking was lack of understanding of their role within the Lord God's super-system.

"God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand. Now, when you finally discover how something works, you get some laws which you're taking away from God; you don't need him anymore. But you need him for the other mysteries. So therefore you leave him to create the universe because we haven't figured that out yet; you need him for understanding those things which you don't believe the laws will explain, such as consciousness, or why you only live to a certain length of time -- life and death -- stuff like that. God is always associated with those things that you do not understand."

Richard Feynman, quoted by P. C. W. Davies and J. Brown in Superstrings: A Theory of Everything,p. 208
http://www.bayarea.net/~kins/God/Feynman_atheism.html

also see http://www.fotuva.org/online/frameload.htm?/online/science.htm

So far, it is clear that the Lord God has difficulties communicating with humans. Therefore he has to talk to people who are not necessarily perfect ( whatever this means in his world) but to people that are capable of hearing him. If he thinks that this ability is hereditary, then his promises to increase the number of descendants of such a person make perfect sense, because, looking into the future, if there's no communication/understanding, the chances of uncoerced compliance are very low.

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Entries tagged with god

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