h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Better cut back on the Star Trek, my friend

Or forget all that prevaricating bullshit the jesuits told you. Btw, I also had first-hand exposure to that guff

Something which exists 'outside time', (and presumeably outside space!), cannot by definition affect that which exists 'inside time'

But that is another topic, no?

To repeat: The RCC definition of god is unequivocal. Omniscient means nothing less than all knowledge -- in and out of time/space.

A person appears to take action, or refrain from action (which is another kind of action), because of imperfect knowledge. A person appears to exercise free will simply because the outcome of a decision is unknown. An omniscient person would have perfect knowledge, and therefore could not choose. An omniscient person could not decide to act or refrain from acting.



In any case, omniscience means limitless, absolute, total knowledge, not 'possible' or 'different' knowledge, in or outside of time.

The contradiction remains.

I'm unconvinced, but not so much that I want to oppose a reasonable argument that clearly means much to you.

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"

I suppose much depends on whether one considers 'omniscience' to mean knowledge of all that *will* happen, including all one's future 'choices' and actions and their effects, or knowledge of all that would happen from the current state of the universe, in a way that still allows choices to be made.
Of course, the problem with the latter situation is that an omnipotemt being would have an infinite number of choices at any moment in time, which could make the situation of looking into the future intractable except for a being that chose *not* to interact most of the time.

I imagine a triple-O deity whose distress at causing bad things to happen outweighed its delight at causing good things to happen could get to the point where at almost any decision point, it brooded on the possible bad outcomes and decided not to intervene at all. Maybe the Deists were on to somthing?

Consider 'knowing all things' means concurrent, simultaneous awareness and understanding of the exact state of each and every particle/wave in the universe.

Even quantum uncertainty could not apply to our hypothetical omniscient being

Would not past, present and future also be meaningless, to such an impossible creature?

Ducking (temporarily) back in...

>>Even quantum uncertainty could not apply to our hypothetical omniscient being

Ah, but you see, some would hold that god is outwith the fabric of the universe. SO WHERE THE F*** IS HE?!!


Oh, damn - and I've been trying *so* hard to resist getting involved again.. While I'm here, I might as well add a couple of points on this god and the conscious/unconscious mind malarky.

1) So god appeals to the unconscious mind rather than the conscious, huh? But surely the minds of atheists work in much the same way as those of the religious? How come god doesn't appeal to *my* unconscious mind? (And before anyone talks about predisposition - the idea *used to* appeal).

2) Contemporary theories in neuroscience suggest that what we call 'consciousness' is an illusion. There is no clear difference between conscious/linguistic thought and unconscious/non-linguistic.

Oh...and the logical fallcy of a triple-O god was done to death by Epicurus, circa 300BC.

"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?"

-- Epicurus

Yep, he made a pretty good case, however the question was phrased in the context of the RC doctrine, which Epicurus preceded.
Also, it is more fun just to point out some of the internal contradictions of the RC official triple-O definition.

"Contemporary theories in neuroscience suggest that what we call 'consciousness' is an illusion. There is no clear difference between conscious/linguistic thought and unconscious/non-linguistic."

Are you suggesting there is some sort of equivalence between consciousness and linguistic ability?

F

I don't think the suggestion is that there is any kind of linear relationship ('the greater vocabulary, the more conscious'), but more one that once there is some kind of language-processing going on, things in the brain can operate at a whole different level.

For example, if there is a background process in the brain ticking away and effectively making an internal verbal commentary on what is going on, that could be a way of 'serialising' what happens in the brain, which otherwise would semm maybe to be rather a case of parallel processing and distributed attention. The condensing of one selected stream of thought into language might give an extra level of awareness/attention to whatever ended up being commented on.
If memory is linked with language, being able to remember things using internal representations which are something like words *could* be a powerful and compact way of storing information.
When it comes to remembering what we were *just* thinking about, whatever had made it to the level of being internally commented on may often be the *only* thing easy for us to remember thinking about.

Even if the 'commenting' process runs slightly behind much thinking, it may be that when we think about what we were just thinking about, it's really the commentary that we see, not the thoughts - it may appear that we were 'thinking in English' even if we weren't.

It certainly seems to be the case that in order to understand a language of any complexity, we need to have some mechanisms for buffering strings of words and then arranging the concepts they refer to in order to extract the meaning, and to generate language, we need mechanisms for converting possibly more abstract ideas into words, appropriately ordered, which itself requires some kind of buffereing and ordering mechanism.

If such mechanisms evolved for communication, even if there were general internal thinking mechanisms that used representations somewhat removed from language, it's understandable that the language mechanism might free-run much of the time even when it wasn't explicitly being 'used', condensing some thoughts into words, with the capacity of the language-unit for buffering partial sentences providing an effectively digital short-term representation of recent thoughts, and allowing us to back up, manouvre round and play with our recent thoughts in a way which may just not be available to creatures lacking language.

Hi Ed!



Except that one is open to introspection, and the other isn't, you mean?

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"

Hi Tal!

<"...Is he able [to prevent evil], but not willing? Then he is malevolent....">

If 'evil' means 'something humans, or a human, might consider to be evil', what if God sent us a nice little plague with a 95% fatality rate, for the sake of the non-human lifeforms on Earth? Many humans might consider this evil, but most non-humans might look at it more as a very welcome miracle. Perhaps evil is a matter of perspective?

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"

Of course it's a matter of perspective. "Good" and "evil" are purely subjective terms.

>>

>>Except that one is open to introspection, and the other isn't, you mean?

That would be a good point - except that it's absolute s***e. (Go on - admit it - you'd missed me. .

Anything unconcious can be thought about consciously. That's sometimes called intropection. Any conscious thought can be automated in the unconscious. (A prime example is when one learns a skill. Think of when you learnt to drive. At first, you had to think about what to do with your feet whenever you changed gear. Now you can suddenly find yourself at work without having been conscious of having driven there.)

Nope. The two categories are illusory. So illusory that we don't even know what consciousness means, how to detect it, what units to measure it in...etc.

Dawkins said something along the lines that 'all philosophy must be re-evaluated in the light of Darwin.' Equally, replace 'Darwin' with 'contemporary neuroscience.' Theology is dead. Long live the brain.

I'd certainly agree that there's a continuum betwen conscious and unconscious - much is a matter of awareness, and I'm sure I'm not the only person to constantly have had thoughts I was very dimly aware of (but which presumably seemed less relevant than my main train of thought) flicker on the edges of my 'consciousness' only to fade to obscurity.

In any case, for some purposes the distinction could things more confusing - if Fred's decisions are an end result of mental processes which are *partly* conscious, how much to blame is Fred for those decisions.
When people are educated to behave in a particular way, the intention is not just that their conscious mind absorbs the lesson, but that the essence of the teaching soaks right down into the rest of the brain. If they fail to behave 'correctly' it could be down to a failure of their conscious or unconscious mind (or both) to have learned the lesson. Does it really make much difference exactly where the failure lies if the same *person* is still to blame?
Similarly with creditable acts - if someone is trained such that doing something good is second natire and they then do good, do they deserve more or less credit than someone who had to consciously think?

Does anyone employ *just* somebody's conscious mind, rather than a whole person?

Hi P-C

What Blathers said.

Also, I would not presume to an interpretation of what Epicurus meant by 'evil'
I was merely posting a relevant quote attributed to:

'..the man in genius who o'er-topped
The human race, extinguishing all others,
As sun, in ether arisen, all the stars.'

I'd go further than Potholer. Nobody's managed to detect consciousness. So...does it exist?

An analogy: I have a friend who is a theoretical particle physicist. He once described his job as 'inventing things which may or may not exist.' But at least he has the good grace to let his pals at CERN know, so that they can tell him whether or not he's barking up the wrong tree.

Would anyone like to offer some empirical evidence for the existence of consciousness? Or for a distinction between the conscious and unconscious minds?

I think it rather depends what consciousness is defined as, bearing in mind that if there is a continuum, there won't be a clean definition.

At the most basic level, we could start by thinking of consciousness as a level of awareness particularly conducive to memory and certain kinds of thought or description.

Though I feel like I am a fairly visual thinker, were someone to ask me "What were the colours of the bathroom carpets in the last few flats you've lived in", despite having seen each of them every day for years, I'd be unlikely to remember.
However, had I even just once actually *thought* about the colours at the time in verbal terms "That orange carpet really clashes with the green bathroom suite", I'd be hugely more likely to remember the colours correctly many years later.

Even if many thoughts are quite clear in our minds for a while, and only a nonrepresentative fraction of what we are really aware (conscious?) of at any one time ends up being assisted to a place in our memories via linguistic routes, if there is any significant kind of lignuistic boost going on, our memories of who 'we' are could be based on a memory which is biased towards language.

We could end up constructing an image of 'self' which is based disproportionately on language-filtered memories even if at any instant much of what happens in our decision-making was based on utterly different methods of reasoning which don't end up being easy to condense into linguistic terms and remember.

Given the undoubted talents of the brain for looking for or inventing patterns or reasons to explain things, it's possible that the verbal reasons we generate (and remember) about why we actually did something don't really bear any relation to the information we weighed up when our minds decided on a particular action.
In that sense, our idea of the nature of our past conscious self (upon which our ideas of our present self are based) may actually be more or less fictional, or at least based partly on memories of past verbal guesswork.

Once we *have* an idea of 'self', it's quite possible for that idea to bias the way our analysis and memories of our reasoning progresses.
If someone who sees themselves as generous gives money to someone on the street, they may describe it to themselves and remember it as an act of kindness, being not really thinking (or even noticing) that there were two people begging on the street, and that they just gave money to the one they found attractive.

OK - now I've been provocative - I guess Dennet's tenet (!) is that some of the things we regard as unconscious - eg perception - are no different to those we regard as conscious - eg memory. Your bathroom carpets are an example. The same synapsed will be getting fired by your perception of their colour and your later memory. But - remember, the brain's not modular. It is a highly complex network of many-to-many connections. The synapses for 'blue' (the colour) and 'carpet-shaped thing' and 'that bathroom I lived in' and 'blue' (the word) will be multipally connected (so neurology teaches us). There will be many, many parallel routes into the memory.

>>Given the undoubted talents of the brain for looking for or inventing patterns or reasons to explain things, it's possible that the verbal reasons we generate (and remember) about why we actually did something don't really bear any relation to the information we weighed up when our minds decided on a particular action.

Bingo! That's Dennet's 'Multiple Drafts' theory.

>>Once we *have* an idea of 'self'

Ah - but do we though? What we have is a set of perceptions and memories we can access. That's all. Where's the self?



But that's enough on neuroscience - better people than I can explain it better elsewhere. For the purposes of this Forum...is there any mileage in discussing tenuous concepts such as the relationship of god by the conscious when both are dubious, non-empirical concepts? At least the pins that angels dance upon are real!

Oh alright then!





"I think, therefore I am"? "I" - the entity doing the thinking - is surely the "self" you refer to?

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"

<...Now you can suddenly find yourself at work without having been conscious of having driven there.)>

In other words, the part of the mind that did the driving is not accessible to (conscious) introspection, yes? And yet it exists and works well. In the nonconscious mind, perhaps?

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"