Hello, Cy, hello, OMF II

First topic message reminder :

Testing.......

Yes, it is working.

Congratulations to Cyrellys & Co.!

I will be continuing the BPWH blog from Compass Morainn, which was a continuation from the original OMF site on ProBoards, which is in the process of being re-archived from that site.



(cont.)

But, please, understand that God is partly responsible for this misconception. God is responsible for our lack of faith. In that sense, God is guilty of having conspired against our faith, even against our love. Is this not a heinous crime? Well, you, yourself, Cy, admitted that at some point, even the most devoted mother must bid adieu to her most loving children. Those children will not understand this fact of life, until they have to bid adieu to their own children. It is tough.

I did NOT say "bid adiu". I said "up-ended into the drink" told to "SWIM!" Whilst still being in arms reach because the kids are hard-headed but more than capable of learning the lesson.

Adiu means good-bye. IT is not the same thing as SWIM!

The Creative Source hasn't conspired against faith or Love. And Love is not the same thing as Tolerance which is a totally separate issue. You can love your kid but not tolerate the temper-tantrums, the holes in the wall, the mess in the bathroom, or the fighting at school. Whosoever takes discipline out of the home is a glutton for punishment or has mental vegetables for offspring.

Each generation of mankind has thought now was the time for returning to the Creator and failed the test of foresight for the questions, problem-solving, adventures, and loves that had yet to come that is part of the raindrop which raises the sea.

Perhaps. But let me ask you this.......

Suppose I had a magic key to the Kingdom. Suppose I had a free pass. Would you refuse the offer?


Never mind, I'm sure you would reject it, because you have been told to never accept a gift from a stranger.

Not that you would never trust a stranger, but because you don't take anything that you have not earned. That would be stealing.

But, then, there are a few of us who have been born again, perhaps. I claim to be one of these.

Did I deserve to be born again? Well, I doubt it. Did God have a plan for me, which included the study of physics? I won't deny that possibility. Should I deny it, Cy? Am I being gullible?

Do you know anyone who claims to have been born again? What was your honest impression?

But allow me to be more specific.........

Suppose there were proof that God loved us, just as we are, and that God was prepared to have all of us be born again as untarnished humans? But, no, I suspect that you are not even willing to imagine such a possibility.

Part of this is because you suppose yourself to be burdened with karma from past lives. Maybe, yes. Maybe, no.

Nonetheless, you do believe in individual souls, and that your soul has much Karma. No, wait, you may not believe that, although most of us do. It is just human to feel burdened.


5:50---------

No, you feel that your soul has not yet had sufficient experience. You need more lives.

But, what if someone could prove to you that there was only one Soul, one cosmic soul, and that each of us was simply time-sharing this one soul?

Is this implausible to you?

Why implausible? Is it not possible? Is it impossible that we could all be sharing the same soul? Has this possibility not occurred to you? Why not?

Well, why should there be more than one soul? I don't imagine that this question has ever even occurred to you. Are you going to pretend that it has occurred to you? IOW, you and me and God are soul mates. Impossible? Improbable? Against all of your conceptions of cosmic Justice? Louise was an exceedingly private individual. She would bare her soul to no one, nonetheless, I think I was able to read the tea leaves.......n



(cont.)

She is not a Guest; she is Clan.

Will you walk away from this Morag? The Others shun you now, and you've made enemies among your own kind. And this was why you made these choices. So that they could be here in this place, with the rich life ahead of them. And now they're offering to share that life. They're offering to be family in a way your own ceased to be since you became the... Will you walk away now?

Life, strong, healthy life. I see no shadows here.

It is all interconnected Dan. Pursue a return if you must Dan but you are not going to find what you seek that way.

How many times have I used the term "Collective Consciousness"? Have you already forgotten? You already live in a paradise designed for you and others.

I am not burdened as you and so many people are. Having memories of one's past lives is not the same thing as Karma. For me it is not a matter of experience. I am apprenticed. I'm here on purpose. You are having an argument on these things when you are not. I won't hand you what you want on a platter. You have to do the work and learn for yourself because I've already given you the answers to the above questions but you continue to see it as you desire to see it thus my words were useless. You'll get there eventually - kenning:

Siobhan.

Cy

kenning:

Wow! what an 'action flick' these last two pages have been.

I can't pick where to jump in. Better hold off

Cy,

I thank you very much for your time in this discussion.


Jake,

We trust that we can be informative, as well as entertaining.



In thinking about the cosmic soul, of which we are all time-sharing, I believe that there is a logical gap in the logistics of the sharing. Hopefully, an examination of this problem will also shed some additional light on how I have gone about constructing the BPWH, so that others may more readily participate in this process, particularly as I approach the age of mandatory retirement, something already suggested by R&A, as noted previously.

The idea of the single soul came right out of the physical concept of the single electron..... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe , originating with Wheeler and Feynman. This also comes from Richard's idea of sum over histories, leading also to Jakir's idea of weak measurements. There is a fertile crescent of ideas in this conceptual neighborhood.

The idea of the single electron commenced with Paul Dirac's theory of the electron, 1928, a theory that is contained in his Dirac Equation. BTW, I attended grad school with Paul's African son-in-law. Paul noticed that his relativistic wave equation for the electron had two solutions, one going forward in time, and the other going backward. There are any number of instances where the equations of physics appear to have 'unphysical' solutions, sometimes referred to as 'ghosts'.

But, in this instance, Paul stuck to his mathematical guns, and postulated the existence of an electron traveling backward in time, which would appear the same as a forward traveling electron, but with a positive charge, and so was born the 'positron', which particle was subsequently discovered in 1932, in one of the great triumphs of theoretical physics.

The positron is considered the anti-particle of the electron, and every known particle is known or conjectured to have its own anti-particle. Already created in the laboratory are atoms of anti-hydrogen, consisting of an anti-proton being orbited by a positron, and so we have the actual existence of antimatter. It is an open problem of cosmology to explain why our universe consists almost entirely of normal matter, thus violating the theoretical symmetry between the two forms matter.


Ok, enough with the background........

Am I suggesting that there should be anti-people, as with the Antichrist?! No, but more than a few sci-fi writers have so suggested, and the notion of alternate universes, populated with Schrodinger's cats, etc, is respectably known as the Multiverse, not to mention, of course, the ETH.

But I am suggesting that we inhabit a one-soul world. Why? Because it helps to explain how the world was created, rather like a carpet being woven of a single thread. That's all. It's just that simple! Thus may we also understand our likeness unto God. We are all of that same substance, as with the Trinity.




(cont.)

So the physicist discovers one electron. Then in his Eureka, enthusiastically leaps to hypothesize one soul.

But wait! Why does Pi have so many numbers? And why is there no kill switch on the mandelbrot?

Oh dang, cries the Physicist.
Back to the drawing board.

But I am suggesting that we inhabit a one-soul world. Why? Because it helps to explain how the world was created, rather like a carpet being woven of a single thread. That's all. It's just that simple! Thus may we also understand our likeness unto God. We are all of that same substance, as with the Trinity.

Well the above might qualify as there being at least one metaphoric parallel to the discovery of one electron and the notion that there is only one soul. And who's to say that metaphors in themselves are not just as real as anything else. It being just another alternate universe on the broadband.


Oh, ok, I'm more clear on all of this after reading over those links. Very interesting stuff!

Jake,

Well, is monism impossible? Many would say that monotheism is impossible. Is this what the Tinitarians say? IMHO, the many cannot exist without the one....... the moto should be, e Unum, pluribus. We cannot know of anything that is disconnected. The connection comes first, and then the difference. That is the ontology of it. But the epistemology works the other way. We cannot know the one, without knowing the many, and so we have Creation.



99,

Wonderful! Now maybe you can explain it to me and to the rest of us!



I have speculated that the world was constructed like a suspension bridge, spanning the gap from alpha to omega. Laying the first cable is the tough part. Then you just keep adding more cables, which may all be of a single strand. Think of the spider starting its web. I've never figured out how those first framing strands are accomplished, some of them nearly horizontal. Does the spider have to wait for a gust of wind? But, no, I had another question......

Oh, yes, this was the problem of soul-sharing in heaven.....

On each of its 10^10 circuits, the cosmic soul passes through the O>>A gap, which is also where heaven is, or where it 'starts'. In that gap, the soul sheds its old identity, and prepares to take on a new one. Does this result in there being a lot of zombies in heaven, or is that what the angels are, soulless beings of light? You and I become angels, on our way to becoming one with God? As with most cats, there is probably more than one way to skin this one. The trajectory of each circuit could include some curlicues in the heavenly gap, but that may not be necessary.

Also, what is a naked soul? Is it like a naked singularity? It is true that the elementary particles are dressed in their clouds of virtual particles. Is that how you and I are dressed? Are those the clouds of glory that we trail from heaven?


And, lest I forget, Happy Thanksgiving, even to my Canadian friends, who insist on their own holiday!

.

Happy Thanksgiving to all.

Happy Thanksgiving Dan

and to everyone else too Jake, Animal, Mdonnall, 99, Sparky, et al...

and to all Others, unconditionally, Happy Thanksgiving.


- We be of one blood, thou and I. Rudyard Kipling

Especially, to the Others - unconditionally.

Happy Thanksgiving to all you American friends.

Yes Dan, we Canadians celebrate it a month before you.

As in America, the date has been changed through the last two centuries. In order to respect other celebration days that overlapped. During and after your Civil War, when many traveled to Canada to take refuge, we began to celebrate Thanksgiving on the same day as you. At another time moved it to November 11th. But then after WWI we made Nov 11th a Remembrance Day for fallen soldiers, and so had to pick another day for Thanksgiving. Since 1957, we have celebrated it on the 2nd monday of October. Our Harvest month. Our symbol for the day is the cornucopia. And like you, we also consume millions of Turkeys.

Hope you all have a nice day.

According to the BPWH, our world is not a speck of dust and slime, lost in space and time. Rather, we are a magic carpet, woven of a silver soul-thread and rocked in the bosom of Abraham..... but, hey, I could be wrong!

If this is us, in the vale of tears, what comes next? What are we supposed to do for an encore? Where do we get our just deserts?

When we do get to heaven, what will be the dress-code? Biology? Will it be optional? For how long will our egos still function? Also optional?

Perhaps our already having lived 10^10 lives will be considered sufficient. Does each ego get to interact with God? But we are God, so we interact with ourselves, which is kinda what we do now.



Noon (11/23)--------------

So you see my little problem....... How do we make heaven more material, and Earth less so?

I'm rather more concerned about the latter, than about the former. I don't doubt that heaven can take care of itself. It's just a question of the dog and its tail. I am suggesting that Creation is the dog, in the manger, and the Creator is the tail. Creation is the dynamo, Heaven is the Virgin. This may just be another BPWH blasphemy.

But, no, I wish to reposition most of our heavenly expectations into the Millennium. Is that ok? Hey, we can even make the Millennium a bit longer, if you like......... say 300 hundred years, instead of just 200. See how generous I am!

But if the Millennium is going to be so great, how will we ever get that 'righteous' remnant to give up the ghost?

I think they'll understand about rebooting the Creation and completing the circuit. The Rapture is still the Rapture, after all. Atonement is at-One-ment. That is what it's all about, in the End. Eternity is not to be gainsaid. The cosmic Monad is meant to blow our little egos right out of the water. It is still the Great Attractor. Be there, or be square. The Millennium is about the 72 virgins. The Monad is the big Virgin in the Sky. Commune with That!


1:50----------

So, for now, I'm not getting worried about metabolism in Heaven. I remain focused on a non-reductive rationalization of metabolism, down here. Along with this comes entropy, and its 'reversal' in the 'reboot' Gap.

Does the fact of embedding Creation in Eternity, as the 'Self-organized' Ouroboros, help with rationalizing metabolism and entropy? Does not the organic Pythagoreanism of the BPWH also help?




(cont.)

http://www.davidberlinski.org/

Watch his 2 minute clip.

The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions

“Berlinski’s book is everything desirable: it is idiomatic, profound, brilliantly polemical, amusing, and of course vastly learned. I congratulate him.”
—William F. Buckley Jr.

Thanks, Jake,

With my iPad, I am only able to access David's hour-long video..... http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/204696-1 . I may not be able to finish it, but it does start out very well. Let me also check out the reviews of his book.

I like his agnostic stance..... it is most refreshing. Far too many agnostics genuflect to the Scientific Establishment. Bless his big heart.


If we permit Creation to be 'eternal', at least from the Creator's PoV, then why not fall back onto a mind-matter dualism? Well, for one thing, this would make our status as co-Creators more problematic, placing much more of the burden on the Creator.

If the recirculated cosmic soul makes up the 'warp' of Creation, then of what is the 'woof' composed? There's my rub. That is where I've tried to appeal to Bloch waves, amongst other possibilities and metaphors.

I can always hope that a more succinct statement of a metaphysical problem will help to elicit greater insight. As with many of my musings, this is a problem thay has been in the back of my mind for quite a while, but, due to embarrassment or procrastination, I don't believe that I have previously articulated it. It is a rather serious lacuna, obviously.

Cannot mathematics/logic be the woof? But the strongly inferred simultaneity of consciousness seems to demand a more robust/vital presence. I can, and have, appealed to ourselves as just being figments of God's imagination/dream.


4---------

I'm reading the first chapter of Devil's Delusion, free on Amazon, and finding it hard to put aside.

I would like to find a more naturalistic addenda to our just being figments of God's imagination.

Why, because I do strive to find an adequate bridge between nature and supernature. The intellect does abhor saltations, as it abhors a vacuum, not that neither exists. Which bridge would also serve to rejoin our intellects with the Divine, children of the Enlightment, which we all are, like it or not, as David is at pains to point out.

What is the presence that makes the present, present? This is the great mystery. This is the woof of Creation, the dog that wags every tail.


8:30----------

There is a presence that overrides time, which enables the present. There is an outside chance that it has something to do with the mutuality of love. What is love, if not a mutual presence? Also it is relationalism. To be is to be related. There are no island universes, despite the myriad appearances.......

A winter's day
In a deep and dark December;
I am alone,
Gazing from my window to the streets below
On a freshly fallen silent shroud of snow.
I am a rock,
I am an island.

I've built walls,
A fortress deep and mighty,
That none may penetrate.
I have no need of friendship; friendship causes pain.
It's laughter and it's loving I disdain.
I am a rock,
I am an island.

From whence came this notion? Actually, come to think of it, it might have come from the J-man. It certainly became enshrined in the Protestant ethic. It was about the right stuff, and getting to the moon. Ask JD Rockefeller. Do we have to foreswear that identity? Was that just about ego? It must have gone deeper. That depth will be repositioned, if not repossessed. The river Jordan is wide and deep, but, at some point, Michael will row the boat ashore. The rock island becomes the monad.


(cont.)

You're welcome Dan
Yes, He has quite the linguistic talent. Thanks for the video link, I'll watch it later on.

What is it that holds the present together, and keeps it moving forward? There is nothing in physiscs that adresses this issue. I had heard mention of this problem, many years ago, but it did not sink in until rather recently.

When I first heard of it, I thought of as just being a trick question, almost a play on words. If anyone had pressed me on the matter, I would have just smiled and waved them away. But, wait, maybe there was someone I knew of, who did take it seriously...... I'm thinking of Ernst Cassirer. But, no, I'm unable to find any reference by Ernst to a 'shining present'. Nonetheless, I do see that parallels have been drawn between Ernst and Owen. We do have another modern idealist on our hands.

What is it that affords such an extreme privilege to the present? It cannot just be individual consciousness, because, then, how would you and I know that we were inhabiting the same present, that we could ever be mutually present? I can think of no better argument for the presence of a cosmic mind, and, so, of a cosmic consciousness, which field is our mutual abode.

This cosmic consciousness, then, is the woof of our Creation. Does this woof then diminish the significance of the warp of our individual soul trajectories? How might we keep the warp and woof in balance?


11am---------

And I have to be careful that my reliance upon a recycled cosmic soul does not degenerate into a Leibnizian pluralistic idealism .

The mere fact of the present indicates that time cannot be objective, despite our heroic attempts to objectify it. Clearly, time cannot be grasped outside of its essential subjective component. We like to suppose that space may be objectified, despite its here and there aspects, similar to time's now and then.


noon-----------

And, if time is not objectifiable, then neither can be space. What then of the objectivity of motion, of leaves being blown across the lawn? It is God and the leaves that stitch together our monadic subjectivities. God, the great harmonizer, is woof of Creation. This is the God of the gaps, on steroids.

But isn't this putting an awfully big burden on one poor little guy? Can we not provide a quasi-natural account of the woof? I mean, we could also call it the universal glue, or love, if you will. Is love unnatural? What else is it that might bind us to the present? And what happens to that glue, when we partake of eternity? That is a sobering question.

When we partake of eternity, we must do so as more integral components of the cosmic persona, lest we be spun off, well beyond any pale. We must hang on for dear life. Increasingly, we would, per force, identify with the great attractor. It would be a mind meld.

IMHO, we are already rather further into that mind-meld than our naive, Newtonian, views of space-time allow us to comprehend. We never truly did leave the big Meld, but do labor under the illusion of having done so. This has to do with our naive distinctions between Eternity and the Millennium. Well, there is a distinction, but it will turn out to be something rather more subtle that we might objectively suppose.


2pm--------

Hanging on for dear life......? I don't think this conveys a proper view. This seems to threaten a second death.

IMHO, the only second death is in our mind meld with God. That is the only way to transcend our egos. Otherwise, we will be stuck with our egos, indefinitely. Pity us! But we can never actually transgress beyond God's pale. It is logically impossible.

But is there no true chaos? Is there no way that God can be blindsided? Conspired against, even? The question is not whether God plays dice with the universe. The question is whether it would be possible for God to play dice, at all. God owns time. It is not easy to blindside the owner of time. Could the warp-enabled creatures not conspire to steal time from God? Could they not foment a demiurge? Perhaps that was how we were created, with God playing Tom Sawyer. I don't lay awake nights worrying that someone's gonna put something over on the old geezer.


4-------

Each of us is a demiurge, or God allows us to think that. The better we get at playing that role, the closer we get back to God. Avoiding God, in the End, is well-nigh impossible, but that will not dissuade some from trying. What will they get for their pains......? An honest to goodness death. Perhaps that is where God goes to retire.

But I still don't get the connection between God and the wayward leaves. Is the devil in the details? Together they form the woof of Creation. Clearly this gives the leaves too much ontological status. Should the peripatetic leaves be more of a problem than peripatetic seeds? Blame the wind? The wind may be blamed on atoms and entropy.



(cont.)

So how does God manage to be present and eternal, at the same time? Are we that, also? We must be both, to some extent. Our eidetic memories make us half eternal.

If all existence is relational, then we must afford some existence to atoms. Should that be any problem for an immaterialist? What is the status of atoms in distant star systems, or a billion years ago? Can there not be an ontology in the saving of the appearances? Can we not materialize pink elephants, particularly after the last gray one has been slaughtered? The laws of physics can only ever be expressed in terms of conditionals, which are kind of like intentionals. Yes, I definitely believe in conditionally intentioned atoms. They are my favorite kind. But can they be blown across the lawn?

What exactly am I perceiving, when I see a leaf so blowing, in the wind, presumably? Am I perceiving the wind? Ocean currents have a similar function. But I don't really know how relational existence works, nor what is the role of mathematics, therein.

In point of fact, mathematics enters the picture only through the conditionals as expressed in the formalism of fields, particularly as quantum fields, wherein the mathematical apparatus of symmetries prevail.

When we see the world, are seeing God through the lens of the mathematical symmetries.....

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

Take away that lens, and what is left? You and I are projections of that same lens. We are even a part of that lens, mutually active, part of the woof, as well.

Are we generated by the symmetries, or are we also the generators? We could ask the same of the brots in the Mandelbrot.



(cont.)

My concern about the blowing of leaves may largely be subsumed under the rubric of weathering and erosion, the Grand Canyon being a prime example thereof. Leaves and tumbleweed happen to be amongst the most visible signs of the actual process, which mainly involves water and pebbles or sand.

The problem with aging and entropy is where or how to draw a line between its foreground and the background. Or, in 'theological' terminology, where to draw the line between an actual young Earth and an apparently old Earth. IOW, how do we keep our ancestors from getting mixed up with the dinosaurs, as has been depicted in more than one Creationist museum, or is there only one, out there?

While contemplating this, last night, I was attempting to subsume aging within the Ouroboric cosmology, which is mainly teleological, with the final cause having precedence over the efficient cause, and in which the world is a waking-up dream, into the Telos or Omega.

I would like to balance that, with a similar process occurring wrt the Alpha. Such is the process by which we might construct a suspension bridge, starting from both ends, where the initial and final dreamtimes are the buttresses. The suspension cables are the recycled trajectories of the cosmic soul, constituting the 'warp' of the creation tapestry or magic carpet. I have refered to Nature as the 'woof' of this tapestry, but one may also think of God/love/gravity in the role of holding the suspension cables in place.

There is also the frame to consider. The frame consists of several parts or aspects. The twelve 'houses' of the zodiac with the corresponding twelve initial megalithic sites, and the twelve final megalopolitan cities, are parts of the geodesic frame. The four points of the compass are the A, O, X and Telos, forming and 'X' or T-square in the Ouroboric or Glactic circle, very roughly speaking. In particular, the X refers to the X-event.

That event defines the outer limit of God's love. It is the death of God. That is the Pale of Creation. It defines the magnitude, and frames the woof, of our tapestry. Look, sports fans, this is not a lesson in Euclidean geometry. This is a kind of Riemannian geometry of the spirit, so don't get out your slide-rule or your T-square, or get your knickers in a knot. And, yes, Creation is geocentric, Christocentric and, finally, anthropocentric. This is the one coherent response to the Anthropic principle and to the mind-body paradox.


10:40---------

This is the state of the art of my ability to frame the cosmos, to square the circle, and to fill in around the edges. Just think of me as Tom Sawyer, with a sewing needle and a dream of the Bayeux tapestry.

How do we get from today's leaves blowing across the lawn and yesterday's rain-gully on the hillside, to the Grand Canyon, without invoking some seriously deep time, or without turning God into a terra-forming hydraulic engineer?

I think I will invoke the craters on the moon........ It was those lunar craters that started the process of bringing Heaven down around our sublunary ears, a process, which, as Chicken Little, I am bound to complete.

What were we to make of those lunar blemishes, compounded by Galileo's solar acne? How could we lay up our treasure in Heaven, if the same mundane, corrupting processes were at work, up there? What of our glorified/celestial bodies?

But recall that other transgressor of the lunar barrier, Pythagoras, who brought the celestial harmonies to our ears. As Robert Frost would point out..... something there is that doesn't love a wall..... celestial or otherwise.

And here I wish to build a wall between the young and old Earths? Not in my dreams, I don't.

And what of those wandering and shooting stars? How were we to save those appearances?

Was the iron that fell out of the sky, not considered sacred? Meant for ritual implements.... for carving that little sacrificial chicken? Am I hemming or hawing?

Without much apology, I see the moon as our stepping stone to the Heavens, in every way but Sunday, pace NASA! It anchored the Sky, marked our mundane affairs, and spun a thousand yarns? It was the rarest of the Rare Earth components. And who was that man in the Moon, consorting with Selene?

And what if we had gotten to the Moon, and found that it consisted of green cheese, or that our heads were filled with sawdust? Would we not rightfully suppose that God was being perverse? How may God eschew perversity? How may God ensure that Moondust is, indeed, dusty? If these sound like silly questions, perhaps you are just a bit too wise to play this game. Suffer the little children to come unto me....... they come from Heaven, trailing clouds of glory.

One obvious way is for the old Geezer to bone-up on his mathematics...... Noetherian symmetries, Mandelbrots and all that. And then simply to be the best monadic Self-concealer, this side of the Great Attractor.

Am I saying that there was no late bombardment, no Lunar catastrophe? Golly, it sure looks like there was. How else is a body to save those appearances?


12:45------------

I could say that the Cloud did it....... or it could be the Big Cloud in the Sky, also known as our collective uCs...... hey, whichever's faster. We could knock out that simulation in a few seconds.

But when the meteorologist simulates a rainstorm, she doesn't bring her umbrella, now, does she? But suppose, further, that we are simulating the simulation, of the Lunar catastrophe. Or that God is simulating our simulation? In that case, we might wish to bring an umbrella to the moon, or, at least, a dust pan. If not, then, at least bring a cheese knife.

What more can I tell you about the birds and the bees, and about the Grand Canyon and Moondust? God, with anthropics and some silicon, made Titan possible.

And made it possible for Chicken Little to spin one last yarn.

Titan, the Internet and the Moon, are ontological stepping stones to the cosmic Mind/Self, between the micro and macro-cosms. We are God's distributed intelligence, just about to get our act together, ready to storm the gates of Heaven. Are we sticking our necks out too far, like Tom turkey? Are we due for a pratfall or a Tribulation? Or is God waiting patiently, with her sewing needle, and her machine code? How can we find out which end is up? Are her lips sealed? Where did I leave that darned umbrella?

Now, do we understand why and how the leaves blow across the lawn, and why it takes most of a day to hike the Bright Angel trail to the Phantom ranch, and three days to get to the Moon?

There was a young man who said "God
Must find it exceedingly odd
To think that the tree
Should continue to be
When there's no one about in the quad."

Reply:
"Dear Sir: Your astonishment's odd;
I am always about in the quad.
And that's why the tree
Will continue to be
Since observed by, Yours faithfully, God."

Well, perhaps. But, quite frankly, I wouldn't want God to be losing sleep over every tree in every quad. In this age of tree-hugging, it seems to me that if a Stanford ecology coed were to wake and miss the Tree, there would be hell to pay. In which cosmic simulation do the trees of Birnam wood come to high Dunsinane? Can't we leave that simulation to Willy?

When the leaves blow across my lawn, should they disappear on the Neighbor's, who happens to be away, sipping a painkiller at the Soggy Dollar? How do we invoke the Least Action Principle? Where is Emmy, when we need her? How can blowing leaves be conserved, while allowing flying saucers to materialize? Did Emmy put that in her computer?


3:30---------

A watched pot never boils. But can an unwitnessed saucer materialize? Ask Ingo.


4:35---------

It may not be a brute force materialization. It might be more a question of navigation, using your neighborhood psychic as the Vortac beacon. No wonder that witches got the torch. I mean who wanted those little buggers snooping around?

But still, we are dealing with a very considerable discontinuity, in this navigation between worlds. Angels come and rescue folks. Is it psychokinesis? Ingo was a big-time RV person. It works both ways. Saucers have direct access to our shared psychic spaces. We have direct perception, usually more passive. Whatever they do, they don't seem to rule this roost. They would much rather play hide and seek. They take after the old Guy, naturally.

They stoop, but don't quite conquer. They don't have the gift of the gab, unless you wish to count the Urantia book, wherein brevity is not the soul of its wit. Does it not seem witless?

You can't fly a craft without the critter. Crafts and critters are wont to transgress our form of matter, but they don't mind drinking our water, when it suits. Or a draught of bovine blood. They may be vampires of our emotions...... they being the virgins and we the dynamo, or is it the other way?




(cont.)

I woke up last night worrying about the umbrella problem.......

It is easy enough to embed avatars/zombies in a simulation, but that is not to suppose that they could also function as perceivers of the simulation. Attached to most simulations is a display device whereby an external observer is able to visualize, or otherwise make sense of, the simulation.

The notion or model that I was starting from was that of a dream, wherein at least one observer is 'automatically' embedded. If this happens automatically in the brain's simulation, why not suppose that it can happen in the computer's simulation? Well, this is one strong indication of a conceptual difference, one that gives rise to the homunculus problem.

Many game simulations necessarily attach artificial intelligence to their avatars, such that it may not be easy to tell if the avatar is being controlled online of offline. For the proponent of Strong AI, there need be no real differenc..... the one thing that is impossible to simulate is consciousness..... it can only be emulated, from their PoV, and in accord with the Turing test. It occurs to me that this avatar problem may provide and additional argument against Strong AI. OTOH, it might also provide some ammunition for immaterialism....... killing two birds with one stone? That seems unlikely.

Let me try to rationalize this last piece of intuition...... I was attempting to look at the homunculus problem from the perspective of a game designer. When it comes to the intelligence of the offline avatar, there is no there, there. That intelligence is simply a part of the overall game design, particularly on the 'perceiving' end of it. But then is occurs to me that this is also how the BPWH is supposed to work. There is but one mastermind, of which we creatures are the pale reflections. Distributed intelligence? Well, that is just part of the illusion. This is just another statement of monism, if not monotheism.

But how does this mastermind hypothesis fit in with the idea of the recirculated soul, and of our status as co-Creators? Am I defeating my own purpose? Or perhaps this is just a stronger version of co-Creation. Perhaps it is the recirculated soul that must be revisited. But that is supposed to be the very fabric of this creative tapestry. Where is my mastermind, when I need it? Am I trying to have my cake and eat it, too? Well, that's supposed to be the point, after all.

But in what sense are game avatars not also functioning as recirculated souls? Isn't that how the object oriented programming (OOP) is supposed to work? But that would be panpsychism with a vengeance. Hey, it might even be a panpsychic catastrophe. I'm reminded of Harman's Quadruple Object, perhaps. OOO, object oriented ontology, is supposedly the opposite of immaterialism, but maybe not. Hmmm........

Does OOO not necessarily lead to reductionism? In a game the avatars do actually share the same 'soul'. So do the chairs and tables, each after their own kind. That's how the ontological hierarchy or 'class inheritance' is supposed to work. And there are any number of ontologies. Perhaps I've been too dismissive, owing to the context. I did certainly take to Smalltalk, back in the day.

In the article about the new supercomputer, Titan, it was noted that one of the most recalcitrant phenomena to being simulated is the car crash. Crash dummies unite! Nonetheless, the cosmic mind doesn't crash when your car crashes. The car just goes right ahead and does its crunchy thing. Is this the defeater of immaterialism?


11:25----------

I'm listening to Ray Kurzweil on Diane Rhem. He is touting his new book, How to Create a Mind.

I am surprised that Ray gives obeisance to the anthropic principle on the first page of his introduction. And now, on the radio, he is also touting consciousness as a real problem. Wisdom is often hard to deny, in one's maturity. Some of our very youthful, heroic compartmentalization inevitably becomes eroded.

One thing I have noted is that the Transhumanists tend to ignore the ETH. If they're so smart, the ET's, why aren't they here? If they are here, why are they avoiding us?

Ray mentions Peter Diamandis' book, Abundance. I'll have to see where he is wrt the ETH. They are cofounders of the Singularity University.


12:35-----------

I'm wondering if we can't bootstrap the car-crash....... This is like in mathematics, when one does first and second approximations to a function, by expanding it in a Taylor series, or some such strategy.

I have presumed that the BPW, along with it's Creator is bootstrapped, wherein the soul trajectories or the warp is the strap. Most creations involve some sort of iterative process. In its first iteration, the car would be difficult to distinguish from the donkey-cart. Everything is low-res. As the soul keeps looping, we build up an increasingly hi-res library of phenomena, ontologies. This seems awfully contrived, I'll readily admit.

God has, bless her heart, contrived to make Creation appear to be terribly uncontrived. All to what end? To deceive us? You and I are the straps. God/love is the buckle. In the Nth approximation, do we not end up with real atoms, or how do we avoid such? How is individuality maintained, along with the ontologies? Does this not also depend on the objectification of space-time? But atoms are anything but individual. Their functionality follows directly from their lack of individuality. They are the interchangeable parts, par excellence.


1:40 (11')------- A is to meet with PB re: Kashmiri liberation, and the founding of a model girl's school on a yet to be designated Aegean island. Gregory Benford may write a presentation. R is still looking for the venue of Larry's UFO meeting, supposedly at an old NASA centrifuge site in Philadelphia.



I wonder if there could be a generic car crash that could, somehow, be individuated, on a case by case basis, without invoking individual atoms? How contrived should an immaterial car-crash be? There is no such thing as a best possible or ideal car-crash. No archetype. This is the problem with most entropic processes. It is the entropy which individuates us, although memory generally seems to be anti-entropic.

How does a car-crash differ from a photograph, in terms of its being a computer or memory problem? It is a question of TMI wrt to immaterialism. But how much information is too much, or too little? Does a photo create information, or merely relocate or reallocate it?

The vast majority of information is merely potentially so, even when digitally photographed and stored. But cannot that potentiality be actualized through random or spontaneous testing. There are no observable gaps in nature, so, naturally, we suppose there are none. Is information constantly filling-in around us, like a shadow? And why should I be afraid of TMI?

Am I afraid of trees falling in the forest? Would it not be more worrisome if they didn't fall? Are there trees in heaven? Do they fall? Is there a heaven? It is the reductivism associated with TMI, particularly that portion that is entropy induced, that an immaterialist is likely to find worrisome. There is also the associated problem of indirect perception, which lends credence to brain/mind identity.

The main goal of immaterialism is to explain the world w/o resorting to matter...... to explain phenomena w/o resorting to atoms. Lessening the amount of data to be explained makes our job that much easier. TMI, OTOH, seems to make atoms indispensable as the ultimate place holders of information.


5:40-----------

How much info in a wrecked car? In a dilapidated house..... in a rotting tree? More or less info than in the uncorrupted object? As entropy increases, does the information do likewise? Well, theoretically it does, but even the definition of 'theoretical', in this context, is highly problematic. Information always must be defined within a arbitrary horizon, whereas entropy can be more general.

What about the entropy or info contained in a steady-state cyclical system, as the universe might be? Is it truly impossible for information to be erased or disappear?



(cont.)

I have to thank you, anyone, for being patient with my excursus into blowing leaves and car wrecks. If we're lucky, it might help to shed some light on a particular kind of thought process, which has something to do with the devil being in the details. But, since I'm not a dualist, I hope to use certain extreme details as a means of triangulating God's love. I wrestle with the details until I have forgotten how I got to them, and then see if I can extricate myself. It's kind of like spelunking without a string. You never know when you may see the light of day, again.

What tidbits do I bring back from the junkyard and leaf pile? How about..... don't sweat the details? Well, that's easier said than done. It's mostly a question of figuring out what is good enough for 'gummint' work..... or how to keep the immaterial ball in play, despite the odds. I have only to get enough of the details right in order to make it possible for someone to continue exploring this Plato's cave.

It's also a useful exercise in how to see the light at the end of a inordinately long and twisting tunnel. Where is the love in a car wreck? It has to do with customization and individuation. These were two notions about which the father of western philosophy was, quite evidently, clueless, asleep at the switch, and 2400 years before his time. It has to with the Athens-Jerusalem axis. How do we finally see them in perspective, in the perspective of postmodernity, say?

Memory is the great individuator for us sapients, from wherever it and we may come. There are ample details in our NDE life reviews, and all the other details be damned. What else is the point? Many a car wreck is to be found in our NDE's, bless their poignancy. After that they are headed back to the smelter and the glue factory. Sayonara..... hasta la vista.

So, do I get my gold star? Well, what about the uTube in the Sky, the akashic record? That record is virtually synonymous with our ouroboric, young/old Earth.

Love is about mind over matter. Where there is a will, there is a way. It is also, very much about what is personal. That is why we have to consider that ancient axis of wisdom. How are love and perfection to be balanced? That, dear friends, is precisely what the BPW is for. It is the fulcrum of that balance. Give me that fulcrum and I will, and already have moved the world, even though its denizens think they are wandering..... lost in space. How far can you get lost into space, into the cave, into the forest..... only half way.

The X-event was both our fulcrum and our halfway point, our PoNR. God entirely poured herself into that event, and you can take that to the bank.

I stepped out to the car, checking its post-Irenic 'bilge', and caught a few seconds of NPR...... There had been an anti-LDS demo in Moscow, just before the election. Why, they wondered. Why LDS, I have wondered. It has to do with the axis of wisdom. LDS and Islam got lost in Plato's cave. They didn't have a long enough string. How do the prisoners turn around to see the light? Hey, it's kind of a personal thing. My job is to point to..... to rationalize the Person. You have to spend three days and nights wandering in the junkyard in order to get that...... and to make it good enough for gummint work.

As John Wheeler used to say, the only real phenomenon is an observed phenomenon. See, that's just what I'm driving at...... Once we understand how and why observation is a personal thing, we will have the key to Creation. I think I caught a glimpse of that in the junkyard, and I've come back to try to explain it, even just to myself.

It has something to do with weak measurements and the pilot wave, and what is the optimal way to assign the details to the Devil or to the junkyard. If only I could remember where that junkyard was.

It's not inside a black hole, although that might be a first approximation. And guess where I'll be at 12:12 on 12/12/12? Be there or be (times) Square..... and, yes, Greenwich, village/NYU, that is!

And speaking of the times....... http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/28/world/middleeast/sunni-leaders-gaining-clout-in-mideast.html?hp Yes, there is also the Istanbul-Athens-Rome axis. That makes a T-square, right about at the cave. And A is headed to Rome, I believe. That should pretty much cover the waterfront. What are the Spratlies, when compared with (rose) K?


10:45-------------

It is in the NDE/Akashic/Cloud that the meaningful info ends up, which could be something of a black hole, if we're not careful. What is left over are the mega-Geodesics of the Ouroboric/CTC/AxO circuit. Well, not to mention the 4M/K/SoT/X2-event.

And, hey, everything else will turn out to have been...... how do they call it...... an illusion. And, yes, you can take that to the big Junkyard/Leaf-pile in the Sky. Maybe that's what they use to run the A/C, up there.

But, yes, you do see that poor old Heaven is getting the old squeeze play, caught between the BPW Creation, the Millennium and the Creator. The angels may just have to do their own choir practicing.

How much energy will it take to erase the Cloud? Well, after it has been optimally encoded and compressed, all that will be left, other than a very random looking matrix, will be an optimal (PGP) 100-digit prime-number key, written on a piece of paper. It will then take only one match to clean up our act. Poof! Same goes for completing our AxO/CTC..... the reset time button is built-into Noah's ark.



11:50----------

And/or the Cloud could also serve as our Sarfatti/Davis event horizon, if properly (quantum) reformatted. And maybe it already has been, which is what our retroactive NDE's are about.


But wait...... if the quantum Cloud is the event horizon of our CTC, then it is also our AxO hologram. It is the grin on our Schrodinger/Cheshire cat. How else would anyone construct a BPW/CTC? The code-key then might just be the first hundred digits of pi, sort of like the ten thunders. That would also be the key to Saint Peter's gate, into the heavenly Millennium. And it's not so much the code itself, as it is the idea of the code.


Speaking of which, I'm heading out to see the Life of Pi..........




(cont.)

With regards to an hypothesis, when a fundamental premise is flawed, no matter how compelling, no manner of reasoning can congeal it.

Dan, if all is interconnected and panpsychism is a realism, then why are there no other great minds collaborating in your hypothesis?

Now, there's a loaded question........


BTW, Life of Pi is an excellent movie. The metaphysics is subtle enough. Do try to catch the 3D version....... Stunning......


Why just me, Lord........?

1.) The BPWH is all wet.

2.) One vision, one visionary. Too many cooks spoil the broth. It was designed this way.

3.) Being left alone, to my own devices is a surprising, surpassing luxury/necessity.

4.) God outdid himself in covering his immaterial tracks, and in giving our theological imaginations a free reign. God walks softly and carries a big stick, which is the Telos. And he knows us much better than we know ourselves.

5.) Didn't he say that he would come like a thief in the night?



(cont.)

dan wrote:Now, there's a loaded question........

Yes, and I see you are unable to answer it.

5.) Didn't he say that he would come like a thief in the night?

Only to those who who maintain false premises.

1 Thess 5:2-4 "But you, brethren, are not in darkness, that the day would overtake you like a thief."