New Knows

Post Reply New Topic

You may want to go back to the part of the com sent to 010..... talking my take on knowledge. Or you may not.

But anyhow, I have several times, including at least a couple times here, that nor you nor I nor anyone knows for certain sure that the universe did not flash into existence five minutes ago all complete with built-in "memories" and "fossil records" and all.

Well, I now know different, and I know it is my duty to let you good folks out there in PPR Land know.

How, you ask - you KNOW you do - can this be so? Can the Ethiopian change his shoes, or Philologos his mind? Sure, he keeps SAYING he adjusts to accommodate new data, but he says he's a Christian and we know what they are like.

Besides, he's some kind professor - when did one of them ever change his mind?

Ah. Listen, my children, and you shall hear:

We are now in the domain of a style of knowing that takes in data, both personal observations and the conclusions of others weighted for credibility of source, measures the new against the benchmark of previously accepted "knowledge", and creates a new synthesis. In this case it is not of the formal and limited style that qualifies it as scientifically publishable "knowledge", but it nonetheless carries conviction sufficient to warrant this informal publication.

And we may find it worth discussing.

I had been reading this from Christopher Alexander:

Suppose - he says - you are trying to create a flower - a new kind of flower. How will you do it? Of course you will not try to build it cell by cell, with tweezers. You knows that any attempt to build such a complex and delicate thing directly would lead to nothing, The only flowers which men have built directly, piece by piece, are plastic flowers. If you want to make a living flower, there is only one way to do it - you will have to build a seed for the flower and then let it, this seed, generate the flower.

I was thinking of this and its obvious agreement with the views of those who have gotten past the playground bickering of the evolution / creation deal and do not see any serious conflict. And I was thinking of the statement's relevance to the Enterprise transporter and other sci fi tricks of the same style - where some sort of scanner records your body, destroying it in the process, converts it into a signal transmitted elsewhere and used to reconstitute your body with all its quarks and quirks. I was meditating on the manifold problems of doing this and having a living critter walk out the other end.

And then it came to me. If Alexander's insistence on the necessity of organic growth resonates as truth, and if Star Trek zapped entities resonate as false, and if [as I do] I inlude such resonances among my criteria for knowledge:

Then it follows as the day the night that my component quarks and sprogots [we have neither discovered nor postulated sprogots yet, they appear in the literature about 2053] did not - knowably did not - pop fully armored out of the head of Zeus five minutes ago or even last week.

No, I now know that at some time arguably not yet calculated correctly a seed was set out and allowed to develop and grow organically into what we call the universe.

Thank you for your time.

Why not? To an Omnipotent God creating a Universe quark by quark would be no more difficult than writing a few differential equations. That argument is emphatically appealing to human "common sense", on a matter which common sense has little about which to say. A handmade Universe would be much more interesting than one in which 99.99...% of space is empty, and almost all of the rest is dull.

And what was the garden in which the seed sprouted?

ruveyn.

ryan93:

Did I say he couldn't?

No, Philologe, you did NOT say he couldn't.

Sure he could. I always believed he could - well, always after I believed he could exist. Not a wek ago I affirmed the 5 minutes back creation possibility.

The new insight is, I can see that he WOULD not - and why.

ruveyn -

Garden? you have only ever experienced seeds that need a garden? Circumspice! There must be at least one parking lot with something growing out of a crack [in season] within an hour's drive of where you live.

A terrestrial seed - egg - spore - whatever, has programmed into it the conditions under which it is going to sprout - hatch - grow - whatever. You get the spores that grow when they land in your ear, you get coconuts, jack pine seeds - I should list all the known options?

Even the seeds planted in your mind, though that ain't no garden, can and will prout if the conditions fall right.

As for a more serious answer pretending you were asking a serious question, I have done a bit of trying to analogize my way into a sense of the relation between our universe and the outside, but that is highly compklex and way beyond a blind man reconstructing an elephant with no data but a palpable pile of dung.

In brief, at that level your guess is as good as mine.

Is your only argument for this being impossible a matter of scale?

Not scale - style.

And not an argument at all. I tend to argue mainly on words and meanings.

What we have here from where I stand relative to the elephant is

a report, factual as first hand testimony

of an insight [we will not further characterize the insight]

stemming from the addition to a stack of first hand or derivative data

of Alexander's observation

based on his accumulated experience and insights.

Aha moments are usually not directly communicable.

I wouldn't accuse you of misunderstanding Omnipotence, but what I was implying is that although we are convinced that the Universe is immensely interesting due to our serendipitous position in the Universe, the fact is the vast majority is empty, or simple. A God with any sense of style wouldn't do such a half - assed job

Style? Define it. Any sense of style would be subjective to an extreme. So I can't tell how you could use it in your statements.

So - there is now a law that says no subjective statements?

Pretty much anything said about God is going to be subjective because we have no inorganic deity detectors, we have no direct head to head communication, language is a broken reed.

There is no objective evidence of literary quality. After you count the words, you are stuck with statistics on subjective comments.

As to how I can use it, how I used it is sitting there.

If you want something else from me, I do not have it.

As I said a few times different ways during the Best Possible Worlds incident:

Whose world is it? Whose sense of style is it?

Nor you nor I can grade God's sense of style. Frankly, my universe if I made one would be very different, just as my wife's aesthetics and mine are often miles apart.

I am only stating, for the record, that Alexander points me to one aspect of God's sense of style, and the switch-on creation idea would be inconsistent with it.

I am stating that it is an extremely subjective term, I am merely asking for your explicit definition to clarify. A perfectly reasonable request.

Define "style", do you mean?

Or make explicit what God's style is?