Does God exist, or not? Is Literally semantics.

[ColorfulElfBoy]

Take a human being for example, scientifically we can say a human being does not exist, we can say it's just a collection of mechanical and electrical forces. And we are just machines with no freewill.
Yet we all know that is utter bullshit, we all have an experience of conscious being, we are human beings.. If you know anything, it's that you are conscious. You're reading my text, you're experiencing Something.. You are alive, whatever that means, you are here. Reading this.

That is the one thing we can all agree on, no matter what retarded opinion you or your adversaries may have, we are all here, we are concious and experiancing.

We may very well be just a collection of cells and electrical impusles utterly tied to our past experiance. But We Are Here.


We are absolute proof that the whole is greater than the sum of it's parts.
We ARE just mechanical physicality, but we have an experiance of emergence. We see that we are mindless and mechanical... Thats the point. We are something that can see and to an extent comprehend. That means we are something more than just a collection of cells, we have an extra dimension of comprehension.

And the concept goes for the universe. It may very well be that the universe is "just" collection of matter, stars, planets etc.. But it is more than that... it is more than the sum of its parts.


I've always found the scientific logic very true and honest, yet it has taken me to a back void. The logical world, while understandable, is utterly void of meaning and emergent Love. It's a road to hell.
I posted recently about 1 + 1 = 3. And that is a concept, rather than a mathematical equation.
The Whole is greater than the sum of its parts is the concept.
Just as we are a mindless collection of cells interacting. Yet we are more than that. The very fact that you experience my words proves that. And that concept applies to everything, the universe, God.
God is real, if you choose it to be. You are real, if you choose to be.
Or you can follow the path to, in my opinion, hell. And believe we are just all a machine, mindless, souless.

It's all perspective.

 

[BongQuixote]

It is about perspective. I for one think that we are exactly the sum of our parts, no more and no less. Just because a system exhibits behavior that we can't detect in the constituting components, doesn't mean that something magical happens when things are combined. The basic "human" things such a reason and consciousness could very well be present at the smallest subatomic level, but need "critical mass" for us to recognize them.

It's liking having a drink and not feeling anything and therefore concluding alcohol doesn't make you drunk. Then after a few more drinks, you do feel the effects. What's more likely, that the first drink was a dud devoid of alcohol, or that we only noticed the effect after we had built up to "critical mass"? Just because something is not noticeable doesn't mean it's not there. Adding alcohol to alcohol doesn't change anything about the properties of alcohol itself.

 

[ColorfulElfBoy]

but need "critical mass" for us to recognize them.

Tho isn't that exactly saying the whole is greater than the sum of it's parts?
Have one beer here and there, very little happens. Have a lot of beers, new effects present themselves.

 

[ColorfulElfBoy]

To put in another way to make it clearer.
If you focus on the individual brush strokes of a painting. You can say it's just a mechanical stroke, made of pigments. Look here is the stroke, here is how it interacts with this other stroke, I can tell by the size of bristle hairs it was made with a no 3 brush etc..

But you stand back, and see the all the brush strokes combined, and it's a sun set with autumn leaves falling and two lovers led in the grass as birds glide through the sky and dusk just beginning to break to reveal the infinity of space and stars.

Cheesy, but you get the point. I know many of you already know this, but I think it's very overlooked.
It's our choice to focus on the small details and only see a cold mechanical domino effect. Or you can look at the bigger picture, you can see that the whole most certainly creates more than it's individual brushstrokes.
1 + 1 is impossible without the +.
Without the thing that brings them together.

If you think 1 + 1 = 2, you're in for a very cold souless mechanical existence in my opinion.
I know It sounds like I'm just chatting shit, but if you know what I'm getting at then thats all that matters, an appreciation, a reiteration. If for no one else but myself in posting this.

 

[Sakkadelic]

can you divide the whole into more than its parts? if yes then you were missing some part in your initial count and the whole has more parts than you thought. there's no way you can divide 3 into only 1 and 1 bcz 3 is in fact grater than 1 and 1.

i think it completely depends on your definition of grater. if you are considering part count, the whole and the sum of the parts are equal.

consider an electron and a positron, separately they each have mass and charge. together they form a massless chargeless single photon. which is grater, the electron positron pair or the photon? note that the total energy of both is exactly the same.

so there is a fundamental quantity (energy) in which the whole and sum of parts are exactly the same. that quantity can be expressed in various ways (mass, charge, momentum..). conscious beings tend to put different values on the different ways the fundamental quantity can be expressed.

 

[Sakkadelic]

what purpose does our comprehension and understanding serve? what gives it value? it's only so that we can communicate and and interact.

How is that greater than the communication and interaction between the particles that form us?

 

[ColorfulElfBoy]

To divide takes energy. To make this 11, into this 1 1. Literally took energy.
You're left with two, but there was a third to make that happen. An unspoken force. Same with adding.

Thats the point, the unspoken force that brings it all together and divides it.



And depends on your perspective right.

I'm not focusing on details, and especially not things like that, as I don't have the education to give you a meaningful answer. So I'll happily submit to your question with I don't know enough to go to such intricacys.

I will say say, your text is containing more information than then sum of it's parts. You're putting a collection of letters together, which are utterly meaningless if I didn't step back and appreciate them collectively.

 

[ColorfulElfBoy]

what purpose does our comprehension and understanding serve? what gives it value? it's only so that we can communicate and and interact.

How is that greater than the communication and interaction between the particles that form us?

If we take that concept, our text meaning nothing more than robots juggling back n forth random letters.

You know thats not the case. You're not getting just text back. You're getting the efforts of a conscious being back, that is putting in way more effort to communicate with you than if I just bashed the keyboard randomly.

Thats the point. The third force. We are the + bringing 1 and 1 together. And we appreciate the whole rather than the parts.

 

[Sakkadelic]

suppose you exist alone, you can type random text or put conscious effort into the text. regardless of whether one is better than the other, as an individual (a part), you can radiate conscious effort, so it is not a quality of the whole but an innate quality of the part. it only has meaning or value (from human perspective) when you consider other parts and the interactions between them.

you can better define the part as itself and its potential capabilities and interactions.

 

[ColorfulElfBoy]

so it is not a quality of the whole but an innate quality of the part. it only has meaning or value (from human perspective) when you consider other parts and the interactions between them.

You're saying two different things. You're saying our interaction is "an innate quality of the part" yet also "it only has meaning or value (from human perspective) when you consider other parts".

Which is it? or am I not understanding you?

Us talking is proof that the whole is greater than the sum of it's parts. Our back n forth would not happen if you or I were alone. We are creating new, novel interactions.

It takes two, to tango

 

[BongQuixote]

How is that greater than the communication and interaction between the particles that form us?

I think you captured my thoughts exactly here. To think of humans as some kind of special case with special properties disregards the fact that all systems are expressions of their underlying mechanics. We are simply not that special, and many of the things we see as "human" are widely expressed throughout the universe on levels both tiny and huge.

 

[ColorfulElfBoy]

Do you disagree with the concept of emergence?

 

[Voidmatrix]

I personally try to be very careful with generalizations, aiming to delineate the line to which they no longer apply, and adding necessary qualifiers. In this case, my question would be at what point is it not all about perspective? To say it all boils down to perspective seems to twist solipsism in a negative way, ie that nothing exists without an observer. A little self centered with ourselves, no? An observer is necessary for there to be an experience of an external world, but that does not mean that there would be no existence of said world without a mind. A mind is only necessary to describe said reality. Epistemic schema leads to ontological claims, is this case "God is real" or "God is not real. Reality exists with or without us.

Logically, saying "it ALL is perspective," implies there's nothing outside our minds. That is, there is no phenomenal world we are interacting with. Thus there is no input, yet we still have an output. Would it not be more accurate to state that there is input from what seems be the phenomenal world that runs through the senses followed by various filters of our minds (including perspectives), thus creating an output (with a changed perspective) that is at an unknown degree removed from said phenomenal world?

Otherwise, if it's all perspective, flat-earthers are then correct in their position...

Visiting solipsim briefly, which states, the one thing an individual can be certain of is the existence of their own mind (cogito ergo sum- Descarte), doesn't stipulate as to anything ontological but more so our epistemic limits. That said, it seems things all come down to perspective relative to how we operate.

In regards to the sum being greater than the sum of its parts, which I believe is largely an esoteric claim, can be highlighted in formal systems using Hofstadter's dialogue called Ant Fugue which is then extended as an analogy for neural brain function relationships. Each ant, taken as a single entity, but considered with other single entities of ants is numerically equivalent to them if considered as a whole. However, the behavior as a whole is different and often of a higher order than each individual part considered together but as individual entities. It comes down to how the individual entities interact and that leads to the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. In Ant Fugue, towards the end, the Anteater discusses how the same ant colony became a different individual after a storm hit the original (he converses with the colony as a whole: the colony loves him and his "service" but the ants fear him)All the ants survived, but their interactions changed,thus giving rise to a colony with a different identity. He expands on this analogy with neural structures.

If we strictly adhere to the main thrust of solipsism, then everything I believe about my existence and reality external to mind, including this interaction could very well be nothing more than my own delusion/hallucination (brain in a vat theory, the Matrix, etc). Under that perspective, I don't know what exists and am suspended from making ontological or epistemic claims.

Semantics is what is meant by the words we use. If individuals mean something different whenever they use the word God, then it all does boil down to semantics. We use language to expand upon any phenomenon we conceptually want to delineate. But language is limited.

I will concede that in terms of what we are unable to reach, as broad as possible, a concensus on a given matter, then it reduces to our perspective on it, eg God, religion, etc.

One love

 

[Jagube]

The whole is more than its parts, but its parts are more than the whole too.

Zooming in on a Google map proves that At the scale where you can see the oceans and continents, you can't see the streets, buildings or trees. And vice versa.

So perhaps it's a matter of what we're focusing on.

Zoom in and you'll see atoms and quarks.
Zoom way out and maybe you'll see something that the word God, in your opinion, seems apt for (even if it doesn't conform with any preconceived notions you may have had about it).
Alternatively, you can decide nothing is so great as to deserve such a name, and the word should therefore not be used for anything.

 

[benzyme]

western religion tends to focus on details, and completely overlooks the picture at large. No wonder fundamentalists are such hypocrites.

 

[Bisy]

it be what it be man. cant u just dig it?8) its all real, cant be quantified cause its different for everyone. scale it up a bit for instance, use square roots and exponents and include some variables and then ask if the sum equals the whole. one guy solves it without effort cause thats what he is into, the answer is yes. another guy spends 3 days, asks google a thousand questions, smokes 1/4 ounce of weed, and still cant figure it out.. so now 1+1=1000...

 

[Bisy]

can you cut 2, 1 foot pieces from a 2 foot board? no, you cant because wood doesnt slice. the blade required to cut it consumes some of the wood.

u can be damn certain god exists, that was proven the very moment someone took another persons life over it.

 

[Seeingisbelieving]

"Almost 99% of the mass of the human body is made up of six elements: oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus. Only about 0.85% is composed of another five elements: potassium, sulfur, sodium, chlorine, and magnesium. All 11 are necessary for life."

CHON


Stellar nucleosynthesis - Wikipedia

[YOUTUBE]

lol

 

[Bisy]

nothing is real, upon death, you will run to your computer and tell all your fellow nexians about the wildest trip where you experienced an entire life, from birth to death as something called a human.

 

[benzyme]

[YOUTUBE]