as half an ‘orange’ is a fraction of the seed, what is a whole orange? [can ‘whole’ beings such as god exist] ~ an argument of epic ‘proportions’.

[Amorphos]

as half an ‘orange’ is a fraction of the seed, what is a whole orange? [can ‘whole’ beings such as god exist] ~ an argument of epic ‘proportions’.

here i wish to address the arguments where god is continually pushed beyond the reach of science and philosophy.

half an orange is a fraction of an orange, which in turn is a fraction of the tree, which then is a fraction of its ancestral seed. although we think of the world in turns of wholes and fractions, this is simply a misrepresentation of the reality presented to us. in truth reality is only composed of fractions, infinitely divisible abstract entities. we could go the other way and say that perhaps there are only wholes e.g. half an orange is still a whole entity, but as i see it there is no whole orange i.e. there are no whole entities and cannot be [what we call a whole orange is still a fractional part of reality].

the i dea here is very simple so without further ado i think we can jump straight to the main principles...

rule: all p’s are P. [see thread ‘nothing is omnipresent’], and no other X can = P...

i. there can be no examples of completeness.
ii. all things are part of another.
iii. the whole cannot be composed of any entities it may contain. e.g. if you have a box [‘x’], no matter what you fill it up with [p’s], those things do not make the container/box [P].

so here is the crunch, god or any other kind of whole being cannot exist! we can’t have a whole entity no matter how occult one makes it, nor how inexplicable it may be, without breaking the rules of existence. we may not also say that such an entity is beyond existence as existence may be stretched to infinite proportions.

if we were to say that; as there can be equations greater than infinite, then there may be a greater whole than infinity, the further you push it away from its contained elements the less material it becomes. in other words as infinity has a value of zero, we would be describing something less than that.

discuss...

[Bovril]

Whoever can make sense of what the OP said wins this thread. I suspect there will only be losers.

[Amorphos]

its saying that no complete entities exist and hence there can be no god as there are no perfect forms nor an entity of the whole.

ok i scribbled it down at 3 am last night but the idea is there


...and the basic principles.

[Jams79]

I've only been reading it for half an hour but I think I may have grasped the last line.

[Jams79]

You're trying to fit physical laws on to a being that by definition created the laws, therefore must be outside them.

[dwringer]

But the orange is a whole. The seeds are the part.

And I stopped reading after the first line, because I couldn't understand a damn word

But also, the tree is the whole and the orange is the part.

So if you're saying there can be no "supreme" god because he would merely be a part of something greater, then yes, I agree. Of course I wouldn't even call that "god", which is why I don't believe in god. Do I believe in a greater consciousness that unites and directs all humans, all animals, all life on earth, all the light in the solar system, all the life in the universe, etc? I guess maybe in stages. But it's no different than just adding up all the free wills like vectors and looking at the sum or something.

Say you've got 4 people in a room. Each of them has free will, but the four together also have a will that is guided by the decisions those four individuals make among themselves. Each of those people is actually a collection of cells that work together.

Now what stops me from thinking like this for too long is that those cells act more or less totally randomly or at weird rhythmic intervals when you look at them one at a time. Only when examining the thought processes and behaviour of the entire organism, or at least the entire region of the brain/body, do the firings make any sense at all. Then again, when examining the behaviour of all humanity at once, the thoughts and actions of a single individual wouldn't make any sense either from the larger perspective. They are merely a limited component that serves a higher function only marginally , probably for no more than a split second, when examining any particular macroscopic effect.

[Amorphos]

You’re trying to fit physical laws on to a being that by definition created the laws, therefore must be outside them.

no one created the laws, they are universal and just exist by themselves as everything else does. they can be explained as expressions of infinity where they are not resultant of physics.

But the orange is a whole. The seeds are the part.

its metaphoric, apart from which it is a part of a tree and both are resultant of the seed. secondly it can be broken down into its quantum parts which can be mirrored in other universes, then mathematically it is infinitely divisible and belongs to the greater set of such divisibles. the tree was a seed from an orange etc.

i thought that would be the easy part. i could have laboriously explained everything, but who is going to read a 3 page thread.

edit; just reading the rest of your post...

So if you’re saying there can be no “supreme” god because he would merely be a part of something greater, then yes, I agree.

well he is supposed to be that greater aspect which is what the argument is directed at i.e. that there is no greater part!

Of course I wouldn’t even call that “god”, which is why I don’t believe in god.

sure, i agree.

Do I believe in a greater consciousness that unites and directs all humans, all animals, all life on earth, all the light in the solar system, all the life in the universe, etc? I guess maybe in stages. But it’s no different than just adding up all the free wills like vectors and looking at the sum or something.

yes i see, the sum as the infinite, i don’t think it thinks or ‘directs’ it just is. for me it is more like nirvana/the empty-mind.

Say you’ve got 4 people in a room. Each of them has free will, but the four together also have a will that is guided by the decisions those four individuals make among themselves. Each of those people is actually a collection of cells that work together.

interesting. any amount of which and we are still talking about parts interacting as a collective. so again the definition of existence as a collection of abstracts is made. now try to define an entity [a given something] that is non-abstract? ~ there are none, hence the argument!

Now what stops me from thinking like this for too long is that those cells act more or less totally randomly or at weird rhythmic intervals when you look at them one at a time.

thoughts are abstract/fractional and break down just like anything else, we put them together with language but can only keep a thought train going for so long before other inputs create new trains which take over. the more conscious or awake we are the greater the flow and the more random our thoughts.

i am unsure as to what you mean by the macroscopic effect, is it the entire ‘product’ of human thought? as i see it there is none, the overall product always equates as zero just as it does with energy [hence conservation].

nice post!

[Jams79]

no one created the laws, they are universal and just exist by themselves as everything else does. they can be explained as expressions of infinity where they are not resultant of physics.

This is why I don't like Infinity.

The chances of anything existing in infinity are infinitely small, therefore 0. How can you get something from nothing in a physical universe?

[Event Horizon]

How can you get something from nothing in a physical universe?

Because nothing is impossible?

[Bovril]

as half an ‘orange’ is a fraction of the seed, what is a whole orange? [can ‘whole’ beings such as god exist] ~ an argument of epic ‘proportions’.

You've lost me allready. I can't figure out what you mean when you say "half an orange is a fraction of the seed". I would have thought that half an orange was a fraction of an orange. I'll try and see if I understand the rest of your post a bit better.

here i wish to address the arguments where god is continually pushed beyond the reach of science and philosophy.

I suspect I'm gonna have to gues which arguments you're refering to here for myself...

half an orange is a fraction of an orange,

Oh, so I was right first time

which in turn is a fraction of the tree, which then is a fraction of its ancestral seed.

I disagree. A fraction of something cannot be something qualititively different. Cut a sandwich in two and you've got two half sandwiches. Fine. Take the ham out and you don't have a fraction of a sandwich, you've got a piece of ham. You could use it to make a sandwich with. But its not half a sandwich.
Even wierder is the idea that a tree is a fraction of a seed. I mean, tell me if I'm not understanding you're use of the word fraction. Are you using it to mean something that comes from something else? If so, I hope this isn't going to be about the problem of infinite regress.

although we think of the world in turns of wholes and fractions, this is simply a misrepresentation of the reality presented to us. in truth reality is only composed of fractions, infinitely divisible abstract entities. we could go the other way and say that perhaps there are only wholes e.g. half an orange is still a whole entity, but as i see it there is no whole orange i.e. there are no whole entities and cannot be [what we call a whole orange is still a fractional part of reality].

Still having real trouble seeing what you're getting at. I think you might be advocating a sort of fundementalist reductionism, but without foundational units. This is not something I've really encountered before. Are you essentially trying to say that there is no unit of analyses the it qualitively different from the things that is can be divided into or came from or something?

the i dea here is very simple

It is?

so without further ado i think we can jump straight to the main principles...

rule: all p’s are P. [see thread ‘nothing is omnipresent’], and no other X can = P...

I'm not sure if I'm following your notational system. Are you saying all things from a category defined as the category which contains everything with a given attribute have that attribute, and then going on to say that nothing outside that category have that atribute. If so I agree. Let's see what follows.

i. there can be no examples of completeness.

Woah, where did that come from? I must have misunderstood your rule. Or is this a new axiom you're introducing?

ii. all things are part of another.

I wonder. What status do you give a) the omniverse b) your consciousness (or psyche if you prefer psychoanalytic language). Is a given thing allowed to be part of a whole buch of other things, or does it have to be part of only one other thing?

iii. the whole cannot be composed of any entities it may contain. e.g. if you have a box [‘x’], no matter what you fill it up with [p’s], those things do not make the container/box [P].

So you taking an anti-reductionist position now? I think you've made a wierd semantic move of talking about thing being part of things, to things containing things. At fist it was along the lines of £1 is 100p. Now its more like if you put 100p in a pure, it doesn't make the purse a pound. I'm obviously misunderstanding you in some way. At least, I hope so.

so here is the crunch, god or any other kind of whole being cannot exist! we can’t have a whole entity no matter how occult one makes it, nor how inexplicable it may be, without breaking the rules of existence.

I wonder if you could have a go at explaining these rules again for me, I didn't get them the first time round.

we may not also say that such an entity is beyond existence as existence may be stretched to infinite proportions.

I think you just presupposed your conclusion. If everything is part of something else, then there has to be an infinite number of everythings for there to be an infinite number of something elses. If there were a finite number of things to go into other things, then you'd eventually get to the thing that everything goes into. Or something. I'm trying to get my head round your various principles and how you're inter-relating them, but it's not easy.

if we were to say that; as there can be equations greater than infinite, then there may be a greater whole than infinity, the further you push it away from its contained elements the less material it becomes. in other words as infinity has a value of zero, we would be describing something less than that.

discuss...

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously

[Event Horizon]

The idea that God is a "whole being" is simply modern manipulation of archaic concepts. It is the b*stard child of religion and psychedelic pseudo philosophy.

The actual arguement in the original post shows that the truth is contextual from the human perspective. Half an orange is a part of its wider existence yet still a whole object in its own right. The "truth" is context dependant, not universal.

[Amorphos]

edit; hi event horizon


bovril,

I can’t figure out what you mean when you say “half an orange is a fraction of the seed”. I would have thought that half an orange was a fraction of an orange.

should have put ..of the ‘original’ seed. it is summarising the entire process, seed, tree, fruit in terms of proportions. it was only a metaphor to hint at the idea that everything is a fraction/part of something else. it is philosophical not mathematical in that respect.

I disagree. A fraction of something cannot be something qualititively different.

is a fish a fraction of an ocean, are you a fraction of the universe? here we are seeing everything as entities to break it down into its philosophical components. as for qualities we could argue equally that everything has the quality of energy, then that each thing is simple a differing set of atoms which are all the same.

Even wierder is the idea that a tree is a fraction of a seed.

you are quite right, literally speaking the tree is the seed. i meant that it comes from it as everything comes from something else, we don’t need to go into higher maths for this argument.

Still having real trouble seeing what you’re getting at. I think you might be advocating a sort of fundementalist reductionism, but without foundational units. This is not something I’ve really encountered before. Are you essentially trying to say that there is no unit of analyses the it qualitively different from the things that is can be divided into or came from or something?

hmm well its more that there are no examples of ‘wholes’ everything can be broken down into other parts. we cannot really call an orange whole if it is made of something else that is not orange. i quite like the idea of fundementalist reductionism without foundational units though, we get to things so small we can’t really give them edges like we normally perceive a physical whole, we can only really think of them as a quality and an amount of energy [loosely defined as a quantum parcel].

It is?

it was a short while ago , i am mistaken in that perhaps.

If so I agree. Let’s see what follows.

yes the formula is a few pages back in the ‘nothing is omnipresent’ thread. this very much follows from that, but ummon minced it up by saying that it is all a gradient i.e. you start with god then everything else is a part of that incrementally. so i thought i would strip the base of that argument away by saying that we cannot begin with a whole [as a thing] or god, the whole can only be 0.

Woah, where did that come from? I must have misunderstood your rule. Or is this a new axiom you’re introducing?

it probably is yes. what is something that is complete and whole in and of itself? can you think of anything because i cannot.

I wonder. What status do you give a) the omniverse b) your consciousness (or psyche if you prefer psychoanalytic language). Is a given thing allowed to be part of a whole bunch of other things, or does it have to be part of only one other thing?

it is a universal principle, so all things are part of all other things by extension, however i see your point... some things are not directly connected to some other things. i would see it more like a ball of string so there isn’t any severance between any given part. here though i am only stating that each thing is a part of another thing.

So you taking an anti-reductionist position now? I think you’ve made a wierd semantic move of talking about thing being part of things, to things containing things. At fist it was along the lines of £1 is 100p. Now its more like if you put 100p in a pure, it doesn’t make the purse a pound. I’m obviously misunderstanding you in some way. At least, I hope so.

“ iii. the whole cannot be composed of any entities it may contain”

0 cannot be made of 1,2,3,4,5,

this is what i meant by the analogy that your logic took apart so well. i should have stuck only to the principle.

I think you just presupposed your conclusion. If everything is part of something else, then there has to be an infinite number of everythings for there to be an infinite number of something elses.

why does there have to be an infinite amount of things? it seams logically impossible to have an ‘infinite amount’ of finite things.

If there were a finite number of things to go into other things, then you’d eventually get to the thing that everything goes into.

yes 0. however i am not saying that there are an infinite amount of things.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously


excelent post.

[Jams79]

I think my brain may be melting...

I mean, I even understood more of what Bovril said and I never seem to understand what Bovril says.

[Bovril]

I think I may have to some back to this tomorrow. Right now, I'm too tired to try and get inside your way of talking. You know how it is when you read Satre or Lacan or someone, you have to take a while to familiarise yourself with the language and structures they are using.

'Colorless green ideas sleep furiously' was my way of saying, that I can follow the structure of your sentences, but the meaning eludes me. Its acually a nice little phrase, that. Read up on it if you like.

[gambit]

Your threads scare me Quetzalcoatl.

I'm gonna go back to my corner, regroup and come back when I'm prepared. Tallyho!

[MET]

let us assume your theory is correct. What about reality?

[Bovril]

I think I may have figured out what you are saying. Essentially your contention is that the world is one homogenous whole. Take any given part of it, and that part will a) have constituant parts and b) be a constituant part of something else. Okay. What this means is not so much that there's no such thing as a definable entity, but that things that are entities, must be related to the rest of world in the way described above (features a and b) in order to actually make sense. Reality does not allow for things that are 'things in themselves'. It is impossible to conceive of God in these circumstances because God cannot meet conditions a and b. In other words, God is not permissable as a thing that exists. It is also impossible to argue that God is beyond existence/reality, for in order to interact in any sense with reality he would in some way have to obey its laws, and besides being outside of reality precludes the possibility of existence.

Is this what you are arguing?

[Playfishpaste]

Okay, here you are insinuating that a whole is in fact not equal to the sum of it's parts, IE a box is not all of the things it's filled up with, it's just the cardboard. This is incorrect. All things are made out of the same thing.

And to address the general point on divinity, Jams is almost right, while you aren't using physical laws, you are still using mathematical and logical concepts, fractions, infinite sets, etc. God is above all of these.

Note: This is again, why I find the christians arguing for the existence of their god with math or science annoying, their god has nothing to do with math or science or logic. I never encounter this issue with other religious people, only christians.

[Vladimir Lenin]

What an interesting discussion topic.

In some ways we can go back to that first cause of the Orange Seed. But if we go even farther (MUCH Farther) we see that the Orange is in a way a part of God. But like others have said God transcends all physical laws.

Like I said a very interesting topic, but I think it's a little flawed.

[Ummon]

Quetz, you have answered yourself: all things are part of one another...