What do you think of this representation of theism?

So God is pulling nature/existence down? Or that pull is irrelevant to your representation?

it works or doesn’t work, depending on your model of “God”.

I guess it’s an interesting way of looking at it

Seems like it implies that God’s influence weakens with “distance”, whatever that distance represents.

it also implies that if you get too close, you are crushed, annihilated, totally destroyed.

I’m not sure how the ball represents the basis of everything that exists, if everything that exists is the net? Doesn’t make sense to me.

Great analogy @doggywuv. The model is clearly put forth and demonstrates your critical thinking skills. Great job!

Interestingly, it still invites the individual to exercise their own subjective interpretation of what God is to them, possibly even bringing their subconscious feelings to the surface. Where one person views coming closer to God as being “crushed, annihilated, totally destroyed.” another sees that event as becoming one with or unified with the object depending upon how close we get to it.

A great model to demonstrate the intertwining of subjective/objective relationships.

@RealEyesRealizeRealLies
With all due respect to the OP, I’m going to have to point out a difference between critical thinking and imagination. It’s an imaginative idea. It does not display critical thinking.
Critical thinking means you can objectively evaluate someone else’s ideas. This is inapplicable to this situation.

As for my own opinion, I think we should stop looking for ways to deform a bronze age myth into something believable. But that veers us towards a subject the OP explicitly asked us to avoid.

@Fyrius

OP? opinion presented?

@Fyrius
“Critical thinking is purposeful and reflective judgement about what to believe or what to do in response to observations, experience, verbal or written expressions, or arguments. Critical thinking may involve determining the meaning and significance of what is observed or expressed…”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_thinking

Has not @doggywuv expressed a “purposeful and reflective judgment about what to believe… in response to (an) observations” ?

@RealEyesRealizeRealLies
OP means “opening post” or some variation thereupon. It refers to the post that starts the thread or the person who posted it. I thought the term was widespread enough to use. I was wrong.

As for whether he did all of that, I doubt it was directly brought on by observations or experience or expressions or arguments. And that was my initial objection to your usage of the term. It’s not really in response to anything. There was nothing to be critical towards.

@Fyrius

Understood, agreed, and thank you.

@Fyrius
it means “original poster”

@ragingloli
I count that as belonging to the department of variations thereupon. Although my version is probably actually a variation upon yours.

Both illustrations appear to be – surfaces being acted upon.

Not sure of the significance, but…..

@doggywuv Would you explain your point more? I didn’t get it.
If God is basis of everything that exists then the ball in the picture doesn’t imply it. I mean, the net the nature can still exist if you take the ball off.

I agree on: all deformations on the net are caused by the ball, so all things which happen are caused by God. Do you mean the same?

@prasad “I mean, the net the nature can still exist if you take the ball off.”

Are we sure that is true, or would that be your assumption? Is the ball a necessary part of the system?

@Yetanotheruser It’s my assumption. If you take a physical, material net and ball and try this.

Let me start over. I was confusing theism with deism.

@gussnarp @ragingloli Your two statements would tend to further illustrate the theological theory that sin is separation from Creator/God. And @ragingloli, according to the most deistic religions, as you get closer, it is not that you get “crushed, annihilated, totally destroyed,” rather you “become one with,” “live eternally in the presence of”, or “spend eternity jubilantly singing the praises of” God/Creator.

Pretty sure @ragingloli was referring to the way real gravitational space/time distortion works, which is what the metaphor is based on. If you get too close to anything exerting a great gravitational pull, you’re compressed into a neat little package of human.
If getting close to god does not have the same effect, then the analogy is incorrect in that aspect.

@Yetanotheruser
Would it really be that far-fetched to say the net will not wink out of existence the moment you lift the ball off it?
And space too can exist quite comfortably without any bodies of mass to distort it. I don’t think this is very disputable.

@Fyrius It would not be too far-fetched, but it would vary from the conditions as originally posted: that the imagined ball (God) would be infinite in size, as would the imagined net (creation). Since both elements of the illustration are infinite in size, one might assume the amount of gravitational force is infinite.

@prasad The rubber sheet model has is said to have limitations in illustrating the gravity well.

@Yetanotheruser
The ball is not supposed to be infinitely big. He didn’t say that. Only the net.
And how is this relevant? Infinite gravity or no, the net does not need the ball in order to exist; if it does, the analogy is not suitable.

oops! let me think about that for awhile

‘kay.

consider the model may be reversed. God would be the over all net of space, and humans are the millions of agents drawing it to them… more often than not, distorting God for there own purpose.

or maybe we as humans, the larger we grow within the netspace of God, the more God naturally draws nearer to us. Religion forces God upon people. But God doesn’t force itself upon people. God moves closer to us only when we desire it.

It’s all becoming a bit too meaninglessly vague for my taste. By the time the meaning of a word becomes as flexible as to vary from telepathic personal advisor to a personification of love to mystical essence of the human mind and now to inanimate space/time, I really think it’s time to reconsider what in tarnation we were talking about again.

I still vote we delimit the meaning of the word “god” to the original definition or lightning-hurling cloud people, and use different words for concepts that deviate significantly from that meaning.

@Yetanotheruser So then the net is a kind of moral space, with sin or righteousness, if you will, as the measure of distance from God? If I’m following that part right, then it is certainly an interesting metaphor, at least.

@gussnarp
Whoa. If sinning moves you away from god and god is the net, that means that if you sin enough, you will eventually become detached from the net altogether and become weightless.
There’s an interesting weight loss strategy. You might even learn to levitate.

@Fyrius

Why encourage people to cling weakly upon traditional definitions of God? Don’t lock me into that box. I don’t read from the Childrens Picture Bible any longer. When you say “the original definition” of the word “god”, are you referring to @doggywuv‘s statement of:

“to illustrate that God is the hypothetical being that is the basis of everything that exists.”

or

“the ball represents God.”

Neither one of which hints at “lightning-hurling cloud people”.

Yes, it is “time to reconsider what in tarnation we were talking about again.”

And hold on @Fyrius,

You just refuted my reversal of the model, refusing God “to inanimate space/time”, but then suggest @gussnarp is wrong because “if you sin enough, you will eventually become detached from the net altogether”…

If you can bend space/time to fit your argument, then so can I friend.

Play fair please.

@RealEyesRealizeRealLies
Actually I meant “the original definition of lightning-hurling cloud-people”. Not “or”. Typo. My bad.

“Why encourage people to cling weakly upon traditional definitions of God?”
Why cling to the word “god” at all if you discard its original – real – definition and substitute a smorgasbord of dozens of completely different and often mutually contradictory definitions?
If your new definitions are worthwhile at all, you could just describe them with new words. What’s in a name, right?
But if their only function is to redefine the word “god” from a concept that’s been abandoned for good reasons into something that makes enough sense to still believe, which is what I suspect, they are in themselves not worthwhile concepts. They are excuses to cling to a belief that does not deserve to be clung to.

I discourage clinging-to altogether. I think ancient mythology belongs in a museum, not in your head.

“You just refuted my reversal of the model, refusing God “to inanimate space/time”, but then suggest @gussnarp is wrong because “if you sin enough, you will eventually become detached from the net altogether”…”
So… pointing out a wrong prediction of a model I do not accept counts as hypocrisy now?

What would you propose to call this new concept of “G”? Master Author? The Great Engineer? Lil’ Miss Doodle Jeans? Mr. Deity?

You want me to come up with a word for a thing whose mere presence affects all of nature, much like a heavy object bends space/time, but not in exactly the same way?
I wouldn’t pick any of the words you propose. Those make an impression of a person who creates, while here we’re talking about a force that affects what is already there.

Perhaps “influencer”. Not very explicit, but it’s important to pick a word that describes exactly what we mean and does not describe anything other than that. This would be a nicely minimalist choice.
We could also call it a “flarble.” I’m kind of partial to nonce words for new concepts, since they’re easy to think up and they don’t have any connotational baggage that gets in the way.

Well, at any rate, it’s not my job to think up new words for concepts other people want to introduce. I’m of the opinion that this is a new definition of god of the second class, whose only function is to alter the meaning of a flawed concept into something that seems somewhat less flawed. If we take away the background that this is supposed to be a new interpretation of the ancient superstition that all of reality is watched over by a father figure, then there’s really little reason left to consider this concept in the first place.
This is my point. If not using the word “god” reveals a new definition to be empty on its own, then we shouldn’t bother with it.

Why disallow change of meaning only for God? Not only are there hundreds of religions throughout history that have already done this, but science does it as well with developing theories and new discoveries.

Geometry move to a Euclidian approach, genetics embraces principles of Information Theory, Quantum Mechanics redefines reality, Darwinian evolution questions random, and Physics creates amendments to the Law of Gravity. Why can’t a God concept evolve as well?

That’s is true. And a good point.
But then it must be said that any scientific concept that is by all standards not tenable is not blurred up or radically redefined, it is discarded and replaced. An idea is corrected if the basic notion might still be true and it helps our understanding to keep the idea for a while more. But definition bending to the same extent that it is practised with the word “god”, you will find only in pseudoscience, practised by intellectually dishonest people whose approach is based on a fundamentally flawed idea that they refuse to abandon before heaven and earth come to their end. (Examples include creationism, astrology and homeopathy.)
The difference is in how far you are willing to go to hold on to a concept.

And if with this post you intended to imply religion evolves just like a scientific field of study, you’re really talking apples and oranges. Science improves in the face of new data, to get closer to the truth. Religion only adapts like a sycophantic cameleon to whatever political changes occur around it, to remain in the people’s favour at all times. And even then it only ever adapts after it proves impossible to prevent the rest of the world from developing.

I’m curious if you could find me even one scientific idea that has gone through a change in meaning comparable to changing from an immortal superhuman living in the clouds to an abstract essence of the universe. An idea that used to be a concrete empirical prediction about the physical world, but turned into an abstract notion when we became able to prove it wrong.

As a side note, you are mistaken if you have the impression that I’m picking on the Christian god. I’m not talking about Jehovah, my criticism applies to people of whatever faith who would deform the word “god” like this.
The Christians do not have a monopoly on the word “god”.

Must one be a person “of whatever faith” in order to be a Theist? Call me a faithless Theist please, because I have found evidence for a creator that satisfies the notion to me. When I was a child, perhaps I did accept a literal interpretation of the metaphor of “an immortal superhuman living in the clouds”. But not any longer.

As well, this evidence provides me with much more than “an abstract essence of the universe” to tag as God.

Very simply,

God = Truth = Information
Satan = Deception = Entropy

Information and Entropy are not abstract ideas. They are quite empirically detectable, predictable, measurable and falsifiable. Concepts of Truth and Deception have been debated for centuries, and although most commonly determined through degrees of Truth Propositions, the mechanisms to achieve that are myriad.

A Priori? A Posteriori? The Necessary or the Contingent? The Analytic or the Synthetic? Shall we pursue a Semantic Truth Theory, a Linguistic one, or a combination of both?

I prefer a Prosentential Truth Theory as opposed to Redundancy or Performative, which of course are all deflationary. But the Pragmatic, Coherence, and Correspondence theories all have their individual strengths too.

Connecting all of this to any one particular religion is unwarranted. For instance, the Greeks spoke of a mysterious unseen 5th element. They called it Quintessence (the animator of earth, wind, fire and water). But Information and Entropy are best compared to ancient teachings with world views that address principles of the Word.

The Christian Bible with “the Word was God and the Word became flesh” aka DNA, the Hindu Bible “As It Is” and the Jewish Bible with “And God SAID, let there be…” and most specifically, Bhartrihari’s Word Principle: – The Sphota Theory of Language manifesting Truth/God (Brahman) into reality with every utterance from our lips.

The metaphor used in the bible illustrating the “Clouds of Heaven” is best compared to the “Information Cloud” of the Petabyte Age… forcing us to look at Information in an entirely different way, bringing about the End of Theory.

The “Information Cloud”...? & “Clouds of Processors”...?

“BEHOLD, HE IS COMING WITH THE CLOUDS, and every eye will see Him , even those who pierced Him ; and all the tribes of the earth will mourn over Him” – Revelation 1:7

”...they will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory. And then He will send forth the angels, and will gather together His elect from the four winds.” Mark 13:26

“Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And thus we shall always be with the Lord. Therefore comfort one another with these words.” 1 Thessalonians 4:16–18

“But I say to all of you: In the future you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven.” Matthew 26:64

On the day that we can no longer lie to one another, Truth will reign supreme, thus marking the Second coming of Christ. Not as a physical man in the clouds, but as the essence, the Quintessential meaning behind the bold claim, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the father except through me”.

Meaning simply, “Accept the Way of Truth and Live”. Bringing us back around to Truth and Deception, the seperation of the Medium and the Message. You know… Idolatry. The Medium is never the Message, and to conflate them as same manifests Satan incarnate as errant belief. That’s the problem with religions, they attempt to become gods, rather than reveal Truth. That is how they justify the wars of men.

But our digital age has allowed us to see the difference… if we only will. Mounting a Disk Image on your computer is not the same as mounting the real Disk. And the real Disk is not the same as the Information. One represents the other and they both represent the Truth of what you want by inserting the disk. The Info/Truth… The image is not the Truth, it only references and points to the Truth. To think otherwise is erroneous. Even the ancients knew that.

Rev.
“If anyone worships the beast and his image and receives his mark on the forehead or on the hand, he too, will drink of the wine of God’s fury…” 14:9

“There is no rest day or night for those who worship the *beast and his image*…” 14:11

“…those who had been victorious over the beast and his image and over the number of his name. They held harps given them by God”
15:2

“The first angel went and poured out his bowl on the land, and ugly and painful sores broke out on the people who had the mark of the beast and worshiped his image.”
16:1–3

“With these signs he had deluded those who had received the mark of the beast and worshiped his image.”
19:20

There are many more references to the Beast and his Image, but you get the idea. God is not a bearded man sitting in the clouds and the Devil is not red with horns and a tail. If you cannot let go of these visions, then you suffer from the same delusions as the fundamentalists that you abhor and none of this will make any sense to you at all.

I guess when Einstein looks at your infinite net he might say: ‘What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility.’

@RealEyesRealizeRealLies
Oh dear, just reading this post is a study in information and entropy. So much irrelevance. We weren’t even talking about YOUR particular far-fetched redefinition of the word “god”.

The following is the essence of your post, yes?

“God = Truth = Information
Satan = Deception = Entropy”

Righto. Let’s get back on topic.
Given this, I’m puzzled why you’re still so ardent about keeping the word “god”, if you can describe the exact same concept with the words “truth” and “information”. Same for the other two words for the concept that you use the name Satan for.
I’m sure the bible supports your usage if you look in the right places. That does not mean you need their supernaturalist terminology to express the basic idea you stand for. You could just use the proper scientific terms. Why would you want to use words with such obvious religious connotations?

More importantly, what goes wrong here is that you also import a number of unscientific and fundamentally mythological ideas from the bible, such as the second coming of Jesus, the idea that idolatry is bad, or the idea that entropy is “evil”; as if such things can be assumed to be true (or even worth the benefit of doubt) simply because an essentially unrelated idea that happens to be in the same book is scientifically supportable in your interpretation. You did mention not taking anything on faith, no?
An important skill of a critical thinker is the ability to take apart complex collections of ideas and to evaluate every single idea or aspect of an idea on its own merits, separately. We have the whole wide world of conceivable ideas to choose from; that means that every single aspect of a framework must be jusitified. Anything that’s there for no given reason can (and should) be rejected for no given reason.

This mistake is almost inherent in religion. An important aspect of religion is that you to accept either the whole package or none of it. Either you’re one of us or you aren’t.
In that sense, “cherry picking” the good bits of the bible while disregarding the nasty bits is in itself not an intellectually dishonest practise – far from it. Pretending not to practise cherry picking is what makes it into hypocrisy.

“Information and Entropy are not abstract ideas. They are quite empirically detectable, predictable, measurable and falsifiable.”
Actually, while detectable and measurable and everything, they are actually still abstract notions. :/

Heh… It’s always a pleasure @Fyrius. I mean that. And thank you for bringing us here. I’ve never once had the chance to share my theories so deeply. I’m interested in how you’ll find these apples… ripe or rotten?

The reason that I MUST keep the word God in my theory is because that is what designates it as a sentient being. Truth and Information alone are not typically considered as sentient beings. God is… and that’s the whole point. Truth/Info is alive. It is the alien other, and it is so incredibly “other” that we cannot hardly fathom it’s presence among us.

You’d have to know a bit more of Terrence McKenna, Todd Park Mohr, and Bhartrihari works to associate with what I’m claiming. To put it in relationship to a theology, you’d have to study a few ancient religious texts (sans religious interpretation) to see the connections. But what really brought all of this together (for me) was educating myself on biology and evolution, and comparing those fields with modern digital industries run by Information Theory, Communication Theory, Cybernetics, Robotics and AI.

As to Information and Entropy
@Fyrius “while detectable and measurable and everything, they are actually still abstract notions.”

And all abstract notions come from a mind, yet the mind is not abstract in and of itself. You either have one or you don’t. Back to our old discussion about the genetic code, and the mind responsible for it.

“And the Word was God, and the Word was with God, and the Word became flesh”

should read

“And the Info was Truth, and the Info was with Truth, and the Info became man”

Go figure… “The Kingdom of Heaven is in you”

Well, I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself with this discussion. I mean that, too.

To think of truth or information as a sentient life form strikes me as very outlandish, though, and I would very much like to know what makes you think it is.

Certainly actual life forms involve information, stored in their DNA and everything, but the information itself is just… information. It’s stored in organic molecules, but it doesn’t have a life of its own that way. Let alone if you write the sequence down with ink on paper, chisel it into rock or burn it into the reflective plastic of a CD. Information in that sense is just a collection of shapes in ink/rock/plastic/whatever. The notion that this is information, let alone the distinction between information and noise, let alone between true information and false information, only exists in the heads of the people who interpret it.
I’m at risk of making this into a straw man. I’d rather you spell it out yourself, lest I get your ideas wrong.

And I’m not sure if we’re talking about the same thing à propos of the qualifier “abstract”.
As you might now I’m a linguistics student, which means I spend much of my waking time concentrating on directly verifiable evidence that Farsi uses this syntactic construction, that Malayalam has that semantic distinction, that the people of Azerbaijan conjugate their verbs like so and so, and that the Eskimo words for snow really aren’t that many. All such things are indisputably there; their existence and grammatical correctness can be verified (through observation and native speaker surveys). Yet still they are abstract things, nothing but artefacts of the human mind. They have no concrete existence as such.

There are a number of reasons not to equate all these things to the physical sound waves they manifest as. I won’t bore you with the details. I’ve digressed enough for today.

Good. I’m glad you replied. I know how preposterous this must sound, and I fully expected you to walk away convinced of my lunacy. Perhaps I can still satisfy…

But we’ve got to get past a few misconceptions first. When you say “...but the information itself is just… information. It’s stored in organic molecules…”

That is the common belief. But Information is immaterial. How can we say that it is stored? The organic molecules don’t store… They represent. They are not a container holding something tangible. They only represent an immaterial quantity of Info that cannot be detected by the human senses without code. Code is a material lens that allows us to peer into the immaterial realm of Information.

”but it doesn’t have a life of its own that way.”

Well that’s debatable. Perhaps not from the examples you gave (paper, rock, cd), but when engaged to a processing system that can enact a physical response upon a non physical thing, then it does animate the physical world into acting upon a mere thought.

Is it so out of line to suppose that since the one who thinks a thought must be alive, then the thought thunk may be alive as well? Energy/Matter don’t need sentient intervention. They are nonliving and do not require anything from the living. But thoughts do require sentient intervention. Could it be that they are living, thus must be birthed from the living?

Look at how a thought can grow. One little thought can move an entire nation more than anything from the material realm can possibly achieve. They can be nurtured and abused. A thought can age and mature, adapt and act upon.

I don’t buy into the current popular thinking that we are all tapping into the conscious universe and that not a one of us has a thought of our own. That we simply act as loud speakers for the sentient voice of the cosmos. I don’t buy that.

But I do appreciate the Bhartrihari Sphota theory that suggests we actually expand upon the universal truth with our words. That Brahman/God actually grows with our sentient existence. We’re not so much inviting God/Truth into our realm, as much as we actually expand God/Truth into our realm.

”is just a collection of shapes in ink/rock/plastic/whatever. The notion that this is information,...only exists in the heads of the people who interpret it.”

Not at all. It is Information at the very moment of authorship. There are plenty of codes lying around in archeological surveys that have yet to be interpreted. They represent info from someone’s mind from 10 thousand years ago. Information transcends time unaffected by the physical realm. A rock or ocean changes over time. Information is impervious to time. The message from then is the exact same as now.

And whether it’s Farsi, Malayalam, Azerbaijan, or Eskimo… “the breeze is warm” means the same thing. The words do not live. The words, vibrations, letters do not live. But the essence of meaning does, with “no concrete existence as such”.

“Information is Information. Not energy and not matter. Any materialism that does not allow for this cannot survive in the present”.
Norbert Weiner, Cybernetics p147

@Fyrius and @RealEyesRealizeRealLies – Observing your discussion I think you guys should read ‘Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution’ by Kenneth R. Miller

http://www.amazon.com/Finding-Darwins-God-Scientists-Evolution/dp/0061233501/

Miller is a biology professor at Brown University (specializing in evolutionary biology) and a Roman Catholic, who is particularly known for his opposition to creationism, including the intelligent design movement.

That’s a good tip Matt, thanks. I too am opposed to creationism and intelligent design, both of which do not address (or understand) the Information principle. I try very hard to distinguish those beliefs from Intelligent Evolution, which is not dependent upon any one religion.

Yet I.E. is so often brushed aside as a new form of I.D./Create… revealing the hidden Atheist dogma which automatically rejects any theory whatsoever that points to an immaterial realm, regardless of what the science forces us to consider.

It’s so easy for Atheists and Theists alike to entrench themselves in their own perspectives. Hopefully more books like your suggestion will offer the next generation some common ground.

Miller thinks we live in a universe bursting with evolutionary possibilities instead of a universe which is blind, pitiless and indifferent.

Personally I think a deity created our multiverse/universe in a specific way. The intelligent creator wanted it to be orderly (which includes the information principle) and biophilic. I believe the deity sustains our multiverse/universe so the natural laws work the same way every day, but I don’t think this deity (which we can call God) intervenes after creation. He’s sitting back enjoying the show.

So you are a Deist?

@RealEyesRealizeRealLies
Where you say information is immaterial, I say it is abstract and dependent upon human interpretation.

“Well that’s debatable. Perhaps not from the examples you gave (paper, rock, cd)”
This means at least some information is indisputably not alive, yes?

“but when engaged to a processing system that can enact a physical response upon a non physical thing, then it does animate the physical world into acting upon a mere thought.
Is it so out of line to suppose that since the one who thinks a thought must be alive, then the thought thunk may be alive as well?”
Thunk?
Ah, so the mind consists of information, in your perception? That is a much more suitable example of information being “alive”. Yes, the human mind consists at least in part of information.
As for the thought itself being alive… that raises my eyebrows. Or only one of them. It seems an unwarranted conclusion to me.

“Look at how a thought can grow. One little thought can move an entire nation more than anything from the material realm can possibly achieve. They can be nurtured and abused. A thought can age and mature, adapt and act upon.”
I think you would be very interested in memetic theory. This parallel between ideas and life forms has been drawn before, albeit more in a symbolic way. Yes, they do behave very much alike. This scientific formulation holds that ideas consist of memes, the abstract equivalent of genes, which are preserved and lost through the same process of natural selection that drives biological evolution.
It may or may not be ironic that this concept was invented by the most well-known anti-religious militant atheist alive.
Following that analysis, however, information is more life-like than alive proper. It’s very similar to life, but it’s not life, it’s something different.

“And whether it’s Farsi, Malayalam, Azerbaijan, or Eskimo… “the breeze is warm” means the same thing. The words do not live. The words, vibrations, letters do not live. But the essence of meaning does, with “no concrete existence as such”.”
Hm…
Do you speak a second language? I think you’ll find that certain things that you can easily express in one language can be very difficult to put into words in another one, simply because it lacks equivalent idioms.
For example, there is a word in German, “Treppenwitz”, which refers to the sort of witty comeback you only come up with after the exchange it fits into so perfectly is already over. As far as I know, there is no English equivalent. Nor is there a Dutch one.

I’m not sure what that proves for the subject at hand… But it’s absolutely not true that the exact same message can be conveyed in any language, not without altering the subtleties and connotations a bit. Try watching movies spoken in one and subtitled in another language you understand.

“the hidden Atheist dogma which automatically rejects any theory whatsoever that points to an immaterial realm, regardless of what the science forces us to consider.”
You say that as if science forces us to consider the existence of an “immaterial realm”. But I don’t believe it does, really.
And that makes it very much justified to reject or at least mistrust anything that makes reference to such an influential and completely unnecessary assumption.

@mattbrowne
I have argued several times why it’s not warranted at all to call this universe biophilic. I don’t recall you ever having reacted to any of this criticism.
It would make me very happy if you would either refute my argument or stop calling the universe biophilic.

My argument was that when you look at the vast immensity of the known universe and compare that to all known and potential places where any kind of life form can survive for more than a few seconds, all of it minus that infinitesimal section is completely unfit for life.
A biophilic universe would have no such things as lethal radiation, lethal lack of radiation (cold), explosive decompression where there is no atmosphere, or compression where there is too much atmosphere. It would not require life to eat and drink and breathe in order to stay alive. It would not be as rife with danger as ours is.
But in this universe, all life has to fight for its existence. Life can only exist through cleverly exploiting those aspects of the universe than can be exploited to make its continued existence a bit more probable. We need to force the universe to allow us to exist in it.

Seeing how we’re at opposite ends of the spectrum as to what Information is, I looked up the Encarta definitions for “abstract” and “immaterial”. What I found was revealing, and a double edged sword. I’d like to share an insight about the definitions of both. It may explain why you feel justified in your opinion about Information. “Immaterial” is very biased towards the hard materialist’s position.

immaterial adj
1. lacking relevance or importance.
Well right there it seems to set up a straw man. And it begs the question, what if it is later found to be of relevance or importance of some sort? What if an entirely new realm of reality was discovered and it so turned out to be purely immaterial? Would it still be lacking relevance or importance? Would it still be immaterial?

2. not made of matter or not physically real.
I have no problem here. That is exactly my point. Information is immaterial because it is “not made of matter or not physically real”. (see Norbert Weiner) This def of immaterial leaves the door open for phenomenon that do exist in a non physical reality. It seems to contradict the first.

The definition presupposes that nothing can be real if it is not physical. But by these standards, gravity doesn’t exist either. No one can touch “heavy”. No one can taste a “force”. No one can smell “brainwaves”. I propose the classic hard materialist definition of “immaterial” is due for an edit.

“lacking relevance or importance”…? What could be more important than Information? None of us would be here without it.

@Fyrius said:
“I say it is abstract…”

As to the definition of “abstract”, I take great issue with linking it to Information whatsoever.

ab·stract adj
1. not relating to concrete objects but expressing something that can only be appreciated intellectually
Well that’s just not true for Information. Almost the opposite. Information does relate to concrete objects. CODE is a concrete object. And we wouldn’t know if Information was even present without it. CODE is material and made of energy and matter. It also pre-determines physical objects at specific space/time coordinate in advance. Every building you see confirms this. And I can do much more than “appreciate intellectually”. I can appreciate a building physically. Information does relate to concrete objects like buildings and tires, toasters and rockets, artwork and plumbing supplies. None of which could exist without Information that related to it.

2. based on general principles or theories rather than on specific instances
Information is very specific. Information is the most specific thing in the universe. Nothing can be specific without Information to specify it’s specificity.

3. not aiming to depict an object but composed with the focus on internal structure and form
Come on Fyrius, that’s exactly what Information does. It “depicts an object”. And I can’t believe they used the word “composed” to help define “abstract”. How can we “compose” something “not relating to concrete objects” if there wasn’t an immaterial realm to do that with…? A realm beyond the sensibilities of materialism.

4. used to describe music that is intended to have no programmatic or emotional content
This is funny. Abstract must use Information “to describe music (also Information) that is intended (intent) to have no programmatic (programs need info)…content.

5. decorated with irregular areas of color that do not represent anything concrete
Information represents the thoughts of a sentient being. Are thoughts not concrete? They are not material, but they are definitely real. Where are they?

6. emotionally detached or distanced from something
Information can only be emotionally detached if it is sentient. Do you agree that Info is sentient?

I don’t think you mean the noun form of “abstract” so I won’t go into that, none of which fit anyway. All defs from Encarta® World English Dictionary © 1999 Microsoft

Information is not “abstract” by any definition of the word.

@Fyrius said:
”…and dependent upon human interpretation.”

How can Information be dependent upon human interpretation when it exists before the opportunity to interpret it? How can it be interpreted if it did not exist beforehand? How is Information dependent on something that can only happen after it’s existence?

Information is dependent upon sentient authorship, and nothing else, including interpretation.

(paper, rock, cd)
@Fyrius said:
“This means at least some information is indisputably not alive, yes?”

No. Because paper, rock and cd’s are not Information. They are forms of energy and matter that can be used to express it. The medium is never the message. The one message can show it’s life in all of them. Three physical things all expressing the one none physical message. Billions of them all representing the very same thought. A thought that comes from the living.

@Fyrius said:
“Yes, the human mind consists at least in part of information.”

I cannot prove that. Regardless of my opinion, I can barely pull enough logic together to induct the reasoning. I’m not ready to fully commit on that yet, but it does seem to lean in that direction. Still begs the question of where are they…? Information and Mind?

@Fyrius said:
“As for the thought itself being alive… that raises my eyebrows.”

Fyrius… We ARE our thoughts. We ARE alive. We are nothing more than the combination of Information that created us, and the Information we author throughout our lives. Out of the mouth speaks the Heart.

@Fyrius said:
“I think you would be very interested in memetic theory.”

Yes, very interested. Dawkins has opened up a few little black boxes that he’ll have a great deal of trouble dealing with the ultimate conclusions of.

@Fyrius asked:
“Do you speak a second language?”

I do not.

@Fyrius said:
“I think you’ll find that certain things… lack(s) equivalent idioms.”

Certainly. One culture has succeeds in compressing their code, another has not. Yet both can embrace the meme with equal understanding. It just takes one culture longer to get the point across than another culture. That’s why Americans can still associate with the borrowing of the French word “a’ la carte” to stand in for “separate and distinctive dishes”. I will probably adopt “Treppenwitz” for my own usage. Thanks!

@Fyrius said:
”…not true that the exact same message can be conveyed in any language, not without altering the subtleties and connotations a bit.”

So it can be done… by “altering the subtleties and connotations a bit”.

@Fyrius said:
“You say that as if science forces us to consider the existence of an “immaterial realm”. But I don’t believe it does, really.”

Look friend, I’m sorry. But what else do you think this scientist meant when he said:
“Information is Information. Not energy and not matter. Any materialism that does not allow for this cannot survive in the present”.
Norbert Weiner, Cybernetics p147

@RealEyesRealizeRealLies – My faith goes beyond deism and I’d like to call it enlightened Christianity. Here’s a four-layer classification of theism (using Christianity as an example) I’ve created and maybe this can explain what I mean.

1) Deism

A divine entity created the multiverse and its physical laws. Religious beliefs are optional. There is a theistic and atheistic interpretation of the multiverse. The existence of a deity is not a scientific question.

2) Enlightened Christianity

The divine entity called God also sustains the physical laws. The creation has a purpose and a deeper meaning. The orderly, biophilic universe is the result of a deliberate act. God is beyond nature and should not be viewed as a god of the gaps. Science cannot explain the world, only phenomena which are observed within the world i.e. our multiverse. There is no magic within our world (the supernatural doesn’t exist) and it’s wrong to be superstitious. Natural sciences are consistent with both atheism and religious belief. Rationalism, critical thinking and spiritual progressiveness are core values of enlightened Christianity.

The Christian religion has many levels of meanings and the belief in God is only one of them. Jesus Christ being the son of God has a symbolic meaning. Prayers are a form of meditation supporting our spiritual growth and finding our strengths. Dogmas arise in a social context and when the context changes, dogmas should change too or even be given up. Rituals are seen as a means to strengthen social groups. Christianity must not claim exclusive rights in defining truth and it is only one world view among many. Enlightened Christians share many values with other belief systems and world views such as liberalism and humanism.

3) Conservative Christianity

God has the capability to directly intervene in world events and He does so from time to time. Dogmas lie at the heart of Christianity and they should be upheld. Dogmas and rituals are a direct consequence of divine revelation. Prayers are directly answered, sometimes by direct intervention. Christianity is superior to all other faiths. Believing in Jesus Christ is the only way to be saved.

4) Ultra-conservative Christianity

The whole Bible is literally true and a direct result of divine revelation. Scientific findings must remain consistent with teachings of the Bible. Christianity is the only true faith. Muslims and Jews and followers of other religions as well as atheists are infidels and they will be punished by God.

@Fyrius – Here’s my answer:

The biophilic universe is a special case of the notion called the fine-tuned universe which allows complex phenomena to happen. We can think of a boring universe of photons and nothing else. We can think of universes which only produce hydrogen, but fusion into helium never happens. It’s already fine-tuned to some extend, but not biophilic (assuming carbon is required). We can think of an even more interesting universe with carbon but totally devoid of supernovae. There are no terrestrial planets only stars and hydrogen/helium clouds. Still not biophilic. There is carbon, but no life. If Max Tegmark is correct a level 4 multiverse is capable of creating numerous biophilic universes capable of sustaining life. See

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse#Level_IV:_Ultimate_Ensemble

Please note, a biophilic universe does have lethal radiation, but planets with a magnetic field and an atmosphere can form.

To me the term makes a lot of sense.

Please note, a biophilic universe does have lethal radiation, but planets with a magnetic field and an atmosphere can form.

Only if you only consider life as we know it.
there could be lifeforms that are so different from what we know that it may not even need carbon to exist. It could be impervious to radiation, independant from planets and magnetic fields.
like the crystalline entity from TNG.

the universe seems finetuned because we are existing in it. but the fact is,WE are the ones who adapted to the universe, not that the universe was adapted to house us.
the sky is not blue because we find the colour pleasant, we adapted to find it pleasant.

@ragingloli – Yes, a extraterrestrial life form might be able to withstand lethal radiation (lethal to us that is) however I doubt that it looks like the crystalline entity from TNG. Being able to withstand lethal radiation would reinforce the notion of a universe which is friendly to life. There are interesting astrobiological studies about this. Interstellar fog for example can’t be life. Life has the capability to transform energy into complexity. When the energy runs out things will become uniform (second law of thermodynamics).

The anthropic principle doesn’t explain the creation of a fine-tuned universe at all. It simply states that there’s someone to observe this. To explain existence and creation there are two possibilities: either a deity did it or the multiverse did it to itself.

The anthropic principle has a purpose for scientific method. I quote: “Astrophysicist Fred Hoyle used the fact that carbon-12 is abundant in the universe as evidence for the existence of the carbon-12 resonance, in what is arguably the only case of success of the application of the anthropic principle: we are here, and we are made of carbon, so carbon must have originated somehow and the only physically conceivable way is through triple alpha processes that requires the existence of a resonance in a given very specific location in the spectra of carbon-12 nuclei. Hoyle suggested the idea to nuclear physicist William A. Fowler, who conceded that it was possible that this energy level had been missed in previous work.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple-alpha_process#Discovery

@RealEyesRealizeRealLies
I think it might be a good idea to call it a day for this discussion – it’s becoming increasingly inane.
In much of your discussion of these definitions, I wonder if you even know what you’re saying. Some of your remarks miss the point of the given definition in astonishing ways that I never would have considered humanly possible.

I think you can safely ignore the definition of “immaterial” as “irrelevant”. Of course the author of the dictionary was not saying anything not made of matter is not important. It’s just an idiom.
For pity’s sake. Haven’t you ever seen the inside of a dictionary before? It’s not exactly a place for metaphysical assertions.
The first definition is immaterial to our purposes. Nyeh nyeh.

“The definition presupposes that nothing can be real if it is not physical. But by these standards, gravity doesn’t exist either.”
Gravity is very physically real. Physics is concerned with more than “things you can touch”. Gravity is one such thing. Others include time, space, light and sound waves.

“ab·stract adj
1. not relating to concrete objects but expressing something that can only be appreciated intellectually
Well that’s just not true for Information. Almost the opposite. Information does relate to concrete objects. CODE is a concrete object.”
There’s a distinction to be made between medium and message, dear. The medium is physically present, the message is only what our mind makes of it.
And while information can relate to physical objects, that does not make it a physical thing itself.
I for one think definition #1 of “abstract” is spot on. You can ignore all the other definitions, I didn’t mean each of them at the same time.
Think of my reactions to what else you say about this as a side note.

“And I can’t believe they used the word “composed” to help define “abstract”. How can we “compose” something “not relating to concrete objects” if there wasn’t an immaterial realm to do that with…?”
I’ll refer back to linguistics. The field of syntax is purely abstract, with audible words being the most concrete factor involved. Syntax is about structures that exist only in the mind. It is exactly about “internal structure and form”.
Yet you can still talk about such things, even if they are not concrete. You can compose representations of something that only exists in the mind.
No immaterial worlds needed here, either. Unless you poetically count the mind as one.

”5. decorated with irregular areas of color that do not represent anything concrete
Information represents the thoughts of a sentient being. Are thoughts not concrete? They are not material, but they are definitely real. Where are they?”
Oh, for crying out loud.
This is about abstract visual art, like the works of Mondrian. I think you could have figured out I wasn’t talking about abstract visual art. I also think that given this, you should be able to figure out why your commentary here completely misses the point.

“I don’t think you mean the noun form of “abstract” so I won’t go into that, none of which fit anyway.”
Very astute. I think you could have included many more definitions in this irrelevance policy.

Okay. Getting back on topic.

“How can Information be dependent upon human interpretation when it exists before the opportunity to interpret it? How can it be interpreted if it did not exist beforehand? How is Information dependent on something that can only happen after it’s existence?”
I’d say what is interpreted is only the medium, and the interpretation is the information. Information is what the medium is transduced into by human interpretation.

“No. Because paper, rock and cd’s are not Information. They are forms of energy and matter that can be used to express it. The medium is never the message.”
Given this, I think you agree with the above.

“Fyrius… We ARE our thoughts. We ARE alive. We are nothing more than the combination of Information that created us, and the Information we author throughout our lives. Out of the mouth speaks the Heart.”
But do our thoughts lead a life of their own, independent of us? That is what raises one of my eyebrows.

“Dawkins has opened up a few little black boxes that he’ll have a great deal of trouble dealing with the ultimate conclusions of.”
Is that so?
Let’s not digress too much, but I doubt memetic theory will lead to anything that Dawkins will have a problem with.

“So it can be done… by “altering the subtleties and connotations a bit”.”
But the point is that that turns it into a slightly different message.

“Look friend, I’m sorry. But what else do you think this scientist meant when he said:
“Information is Information. Not energy and not matter. Any materialism that does not allow for this cannot survive in the present”.
Norbert Weiner, Cybernetics p147”
Nothing about an “immaterial realm”, I’m sure. He seems to be talking about abstract concepts, as per definition #1. Things that are not in the scope of physics.
This is not exactly a revolutionary concept. It’s been the very foundation of linguistics since at least 1200 BCE, and of many other fields.
This does not mean these things do not rely on physical processes, but you try formulating sociology in terms of firing synapses in brains. Simplifying it with abstract concepts makes it feasible.

@mattbrowne
By that understanding of the term “biophilic”, that word only means that it is possible at all for life to exist in a universe, no matter how strenuously. That’s not “life-friendly”, that’s “mostly life-hating but not entirely”. I’d prefer the term “quasi-biocidal” for this.

“Being able to withstand lethal radiation would reinforce the notion of a universe which is friendly to life.”
No, it reinforces the notion of life that can handle whatever dreadful horrors the universe throws at it. Survival under circumstances like these is a virtue of life, not one of the universe. Beings that survive otherwise lethal radiation stay alive in spite of the universe.

“The anthropic principle doesn’t explain the creation of a fine-tuned universe at all.”
It doesn’t have to. It rejects the idea that the universe is fine-tuned for anything.
Life has been fine-tuned through natural selection to suit the universe. That is a much better explanation for the compatibility between the universe and us. Plus it’s actually verifiable and verified.