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Goodbye Jesus

The Paradox Of Absolutes And Relativity


Exclavius

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Over the past months (well, years) I've been working on an idea/theory, that I'm now putting together enough that I think I'm ready to start writing a book on it. The working title is "The Purging of Theistic Thought"

 

I'm hoping that throwing out a very generalized version of what will be "Part 1" here will spark some interesting ideas and arguments that might help me finish putting my ideas into order.

 

The concept is that growing up in a theistic up-bringing, causes one to "understand" the concept of an absolute, or an infinity. Take away the concept of a god, and we should see such concepts as absurdities, as nothing else in our experience would lend validity to such a concept.

It is my belief that because we do not arbitrarily reject anything which requires the existence of an absolute or infinity, that our understanding of the universe and ourselves and our social structure are flawed, irrevocably, until such time as we can purge that pseudo-understanding of absolutes from our paradigm.

 

I'm not wanting to open the topic of whether we can understand infinity or not, it's just that we give it a validity that it is not due, that I'm talking about.

 

In this i mean absolutes in every context of the word you can think of.

 

Nothing can be true, it can only be true locally, because there would be other situations in which it were not true.

It's like saying it's true without any conditions... Well, there are conditions that even 1=2 (that's when the numbers refer to where you are when you have traveled in a closed loop 1 mile long, it could also be true within some quantum singularities.)

 

It is not only the "god is absolute so absolutes must be possible" that is the problem that creates this mentality, but there is also the "we are special, so there is a centre, or origin" factor, which essentially cover both key concepts of absolute. There's a memetic effect as well, which must be addressed, and I'm totally unable to understand the reason why the concept of absolutes being possible is an idea that lends itself to superior reproduction. I write it off to being so tied to another idea or set of ideas that themselves DO have superior reproductive qualities, aka Religion.

 

I don't think the view of the "universe" really has much impact on a person's life (outside religion) so it's not a key topic i'll get into, other than a mention on the impact on science.

 

It's the impacts on our society, such as how we need to come to understand that there is a vast difference between morality and social-morality and they should be differentiated, not tried to be lumped together. How it follows from this, that only social-morality can be taught, and that individual morality can only be nurtured (if even that) And that social morality can only govern interactions.

 

It's our acceptance of hierarchical structures, with a defined pseudo-absolute at the top, which of course fails. When we could have just as easily accomplished the same goal with a grass-roots layout where we start with local rules, building upwards to join together with the rest of society. In such a system, the rules are specific at the base, but tailored for the individual, by the individual (and those near to them) but these rules need to get more and more generalized as you work upwards, so the colloquial tree has the strength to bend in the wind (ie the interaction of conflicting beliefs, wants, actions etc in a cosmopolitan world). In the hierarchy, the rules are specific all the way down the ladder, becoming more and more specific and harsher (negatively constraining) until you reach the individual who in most cases will grow to regret the pseudo-absolute authority that they may well have chosen themselves (aka elected) though just as possibly had chosen for them, in this case it's the rumbling from below that brings down the rigid bureaucracy that lies above it.

 

It's that we sometimes fail to notice when something is "almost true" that we might well just have a "local truth" that needs generalization, rather than being wrong.

 

I'm also interested in any opinions that people may have of the interactions of free will with this view of reality. The main impact so far in my outlines so far is it's role in separating individual and social morality.

(Free will is one of ONLY TWO assumptions which i plan to make in writing this book, the other being the non-existence of an absolute god, both of which if violated would make the entire book moot, so they aren't really real assumptions)

 

There are things that are possible, even though they are impossible from your perspective/location. Physics shows that such things will either be seen in an altered state such as gravitational lenses, warping of the space/time continuum etc; or be "not observable" such as black holes.

Now this same things can be possible even within the human psyche: Consider schizophrenia, we all have multiple personalities, in my opinion. The disorder is when those personalities come into conflict with one another. We are who we are, our personalities defined (and moreover differentiated) by where we are (ie, people, place, things around us). Are you the same person in bed with your lover as you are when at work dealing with an upset manager/employee/customer? No. Your personality is as relative as the space time continuum.

 

My claim is that by accepting, and making it a paradigm, the relativity of every aspect of everything we can see the world clearer and truer. I am not arguing that we as humans will be happier, though I do believe that those whose paradigms do change, would not chose to go back

To say "better off" or "happier" would violate the whole claim. One can only say that those with the new paradigm would see themselves as better off than those with the old paradigm, even if those with the old paradigm saw themselves and those with the new paradigm

 

I would also claim that this paradigm is actually an anti-paradigm, because it contains no real assumptions (ie assumptions that can be used to infer)

 

Anyways, any comments (and even tangents) are most welcome.

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As to your general thesis about infinity, could I paraphrase what you've said as, we can get the difference between the concept of infinity and the concrete reality of infinity confused? Can this be boiled down to, "If I can conceptualize it, it must exist in some objective form?"

 

I've long thought that one of our societal conceptual problems stems from the quality of precision (such as mathematical) misleading us into thinking that what is being precisely referred to must then be an objective reality.

 

I see people do this all the time, without realizing that they've done so.

 

There was a man who went on a South sea cruise. One day, when the ship was out of sight of land, one of the crew members noticed the man standing on deck, staring intently at the ocean through a set of binoculars as though searching for something.

 

Curious, the crew member approached the man and asked him what he was doing.

 

"Earlier today, I heard the Captain announcing that we'd be crossing the equator, and I wanted to get a look at it. Maybe some pictures for the folks back home."

 

Thinking, "Oh boy, I've got a live one," and unable to resist the urge to mess with the man, the crewman very seriously pointed at a particular spot near the horizon and said, "Look there."

 

As the man stared intently through his glasses, the crewman plucked a hair from his own head and stretched it across the lenses of the man's binoculars, asking, "See it now?"

 

The man got very excited and said,

 

"I do! I do! There's a camel walking across it!"

 

Even though the equator can be pinpointed with phenomenal mathematical, geographic accuracy, that doesn't mean that it's a real, concrete thing. What it is is an arbitrary, mathematical abstraction.

 

As an abstraction, it's very real. But as a line around the Earth, it's pure imagination and completely unreal.

 

I think that people tend to let demonstrable and provable precision mislead them into thinking that what is being proven is therefor a concrete thing, rather than an abstraction. It's an unintentional misdirection.

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As to your general thesis about infinity, could I paraphrase what you've said as, we can get the difference between the concept of infinity and the concrete reality of infinity confused? Can this be boiled down to, "If I can conceptualize it, it must exist in some objective form?"

 

As an abstraction, it's very real. But as a line around the Earth, it's pure imagination and completely unreal.

 

I think that people tend to let demonstrable and provable precision mislead them into thinking that what is being proven is therefor a concrete thing, rather than an abstraction. It's an unintentional misdirection.

I think the first statement is reminiscent of Anselm's Ontologic Argument.

 

It reminds me of Plato's Forms. In some other realm, there exists the perfect embodiment of everything of which we can conceive. Flowers, trees and - people.

 

The concept of infinity is mathematical and geometric first, perhaps, but once the idea of an infinite has been conceptualized, the extrapolation to real life can begin. If we can't conceive of an end, we think of it (or call it) infinite.

 

"I love you forever."

 

"But what about if you're dead? You won't live forever."

 

"Surely our love, and we too, must live forever."

 

"Dead people don't live."

 

"Ah, but our spirits can live on forever."

 

"Where?"

 

"Um, in, um, the spirit world."

 

And religion is born.

 

 

Or, waiting for a bus: "Man, this is taking forever."

 

And religion is born.

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Shyone certainly has the basic idea of some of what I'm trying to talk about.

 

Loren, while I like your insights into how precision can lead to a perception of truth, that may or may not be valid; the core of what i'm trying to get at here is more based on how nothing is "universally true" or "absolutely true" every truth is relative, in that it is only true locally (where locally is defined as the set of situations where all necessary assumptions are met)

 

But we seek for an absolute truth every day in our lives.

 

Here, let me make an example with how this applies to personality:

At work, I act in a certain way, and with various types of customers, that way of acting can change a bit.

at home, I act a totally different way, but that changes when i have company.

When I'm out and about town, there is yet a different set of actions and principles that i live by.

I suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder, so in the winter I'm more depressed, and in the summer I'm less so.

 

Which one of those is me? Well, they all are, but none of them are.

To define who i am, to put truth to me, you have to define the situation I'm in (or as a relativity physicist would say set my frame of reference)

You can only state a truth for a given set of circumstances/conditions/parameters.

 

Everyone I assume can go through the exercise for two ships traveling the speed of light in opposite directions, and an observer watching from where they started, and how the ships see both the observer and the other ship both moving away from themselves at the speed of light, but the observer sees both ships moving away from them at the speed of light, and away from each other at twice the speed of light.

In this case you cannot put an absolute velocity or position to either ship or observer, only values relative to each other.

 

Shyone, I think you see causation in the opposite direction as me.

I don't imagine the thought "I will love you forever" would have crossed a person's mind until the concept of a absolute god was invented, and perpetuated through some memetic process. It was the invention of religion that brought about our ability to come out with such absurdities as "forever" because we had a "defined" object we could use to set as a guide-line for such absolutes.

 

We try to understand reality based on creating an artificial absolute, instead of just accepting that there CANNOT be such a thing, and stopping trying to pretend there is.

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Shyone, I think you see causation in the opposite direction as me.

I don't imagine the thought "I will love you forever" would have crossed a person's mind until the concept of a absolute god was invented, and perpetuated through some memetic process. It was the invention of religion that brought about our ability to come out with such absurdities as "forever" because we had a "defined" object we could use to set as a guide-line for such absolutes.

 

We try to understand reality based on creating an artificial absolute, instead of just accepting that there CANNOT be such a thing, and stopping trying to pretend there is.

 

Ah, but when did the first lovers say, "I will love you forever?"

 

The problem is that religion probably preceded writing and civilization, so I can't say that the concept of forever predated civilization and/or the concept of God, but I can say that religion probably came about as the result of the desire to live forever.

 

Also, mathematics and geometry are not dependent on religion, and I believe that the concept of infinity exists independent of religion.

 

If one were to claim that religion was necessary for the development of the concept of infinity, the burden of proof would fall on the one making the claim. Mere coexistence or even precedence does not establish causality. That would be the fallacy of cum hoc ergo propter hoc or post hoc ergo propter hoc.

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