Posts by Mark Torres14

redtinker36 said:.. so, what do you do for a living?

.. does your profession .. have anything to do with this topic ..?

I'm not talking about that. We need to keep some anonymity here.
If you're that curious, go ask BlackRock.😁

redtinker36 said:.. No.. you can't just see everything in black and white.. though that’s a whole other discussion—and a good one at that..
.. And my answer to that second topic.. well.. if you truly want to live in a world driven by ego and power, then sure, taking everything as purely relative is a great way to go..
.. But in that kind of.. relative mindset.. anything goes—including absolute atrocities. For instance.. even something like a mass genocide in a concentration camp could be framed as "relative" compared to this or that or some other grievance.. which is just wrong..

No. Relativism doesn't mean a damn thing here, unless you're trying to play philosopher without facing any consequences. Fraud is concrete. It’s a specific act that requires real effort from anyone trying to pull it off.

Bradley Hayes36 said:So if we’re all agreeing that a scam is inherently wrong from the jump, does that mean there’s such a thing as a "justified" deception—one where a bad act somehow spirals into something good? Take a scenario where Joe swindles Mark, then Pero swindles Joe just to snatch Mark’s money back and return it... does Pero actually view his own betrayal as a righteous act, or is it something else entirely, and how would some neutral observer even begin to judge that mess...
I mean, honestly, it probably just depends on who you ask
I get that the word "scam" carries this built-in negativity right out of the gate, but sometimes the bad stuff is woven into the good, and vice versa... you can't just look at everything through a black-and-white lens
I guess...

Sharp observation.
Is there such a thing as a justified deception?
I've always been fascinated by how complex deception can be, even on the smallest scale. Nature does it constantly. Animals and plants use mimicry all the time—imitating other species to look more dangerous or using colors to hide what they actually are. The human brain (and primate brains in general) isn't an exception here. We just operate on a different level. We use deception to predict a series of future events.

redtinker36 said:.. your whole argument boils down to this one point: that deception is somehow necessary—even inevitable.

.. so you’re essentially grouping it in with monkeys .. and celebrating the little primate's antics.
.. you probably see it in a pack of wolves, too—with some small wolf who used trickery to become the alpha, just like some cartoon character.

.. but you don't mention the beehive .. or the ants .. where you'd actually find brotherhood and unity acting as the foundation of the group.

.. and I'll be blunt .. you started with deception. It was your idea from the jump. You picked up this toxic ideology and now you're desperately trying to justify it—scouring every corner of the earth just to find a single comparison that holds water.
.. and I'll tell you one more thing .. you're wasting your time. You aren't going to pull this off.

👍Spot on.

.. but you aren't looking at it in a beehive .. or an anthill .. where you'd actually find .. brotherhood and unity .. acting as the bedrock of the organization ..

That's an interesting point. Can a bee or an ant even lie?
Every time I think about them, they remind me of computer code or robotics. It's closed-loop system logic that doesn't allow for surprises.
Is an ant just a gear in some machine that might one day evolve into intelligence, or is their world just a closed loop of endless, repeating patterns that only adapt as a collective to new situations?
How? Who knows.🤷

... you won't pull it off ..

Watch me.🙂

I don't know what you're trying to say. Get to the point. Mark Torres14 says:
Look, fraud is fundamentally wrong. It’s baked into our DNA—if that’s how you want to put it. Otherwise, the whole concept of cheating wouldn't even exist. 🤷 So you can't even talk about her outside of that? Fine.

And why exactly would it be a bad thing?
Maybe our sense of right and wrong is just something civilization cooked up, rather than some biological hardwiring. Or do you think there’s a universal truth to good and evil—this fundamental light versus dark—where certain things are just inherently one or the other?

They paint Robin Hood like this legendary hero who just happened to rob the rich, making him look like some kind of saint. Give me a break. Who else was he supposed to steal from? The poor? It’s a total scam. 🤷

Honestly, I’m more of a Superman guy.
At least he’s got style.😁

redtinker36 said:.. yeah .. it’s all wrong .. just pure ideology ..
.. you want to treat deception as something sacred—above God itself—just to justify the neighbors and the Americans ..
.. honestly, you, the neighbors, and the Americans can all go to hell ..
.. why .. well, because the Bible says ..
.. when the first man thought he could live off the labor of another .. he wasn't thinking about a con .. he was thinking about force .. he thought about grabbing someone by the throat ..
.. but that didn't work .. it only worked once the world started dividing itself .. into masters and slaves .. only then .. and only then did Heraclitus say that war is the father of everything ..
.. scams were developed even later .. and .. they're just like today's .. where people are willing to kill millions just to turn a profit .. it's not that it never crossed a human mind .. it's that it should never be allowed to cross a human mind .. so those who actually think this way .. they aren't really human .. they're just cursed seeds ..

.. watch yourselves .. damn it .. something might be okay, but too much of a bad thing is never worth it ..
.. think about it one more time .. is this really what you want .. which god do you want to serve .. a little black one .. with horns and a tail .. ?

Mark Torres14. My starting point is that deception grew out of an evolutionary need. If you don't have any serious weapons besides a big brain, then that brain has to find another way to protect the body it lives in.
Deception probably started with hunting animals, and later, due to complex primate social structures, it became a tool for group survival.
Nobody likes being conned, especially if you're a man and you realize you've been played. That's why some people, refusing to admit how easily they're fooled, insist they haven't been, even when they know they were, or knew it was coming.
Getting conned means losing your status in society, doesn't it?😉

Gary James88 said:Someone once told me that we aren't actually the descendants of the brave hunters who faced danger head-on to grab a meal. No, we're the descendants of the ones who waited behind a corner, hit the other guy with a stick, and took his food.

Deception has always been a shortcut to getting ahead, both for ourselves and others. It’s been part of the human playbook since the beginning, and even with all the moralizing today, it’s still going strong.

Great.
I want to talk about fraud without getting all bogged down in "good vs. evil" nonsense.

rustymaker5 said:So, looking at this from a first glance... since human consciousness is fundamentally tied to our material existence—that whole rational side of things that basically constitutes the ego—the only real prerequisite that matters would have to be free will. You need the actual capacity to choose the wrong path, to consciously opt for something bad, or rather, to embrace deception... everything else is just extra layers built on top of that core reality...

Yeah, but there’s always that risk of someone getting jealous and throwing a wrench in the works... I mean, once you start involving other people, any kind of "planning" is basically just begging for things to fall apart. Like you said, a total amateur could just... predicting... How exactly would she react, and would she actually go through with it... I mean, Mel could have just stepped in, told her off, or maybe even broken the news to her mother that there wasn't any danger at all. But honestly, the kid could only really feel certain about how things would play out if he knew this kind of thing had happened before—if he was absolutely sure his mother would react exactly the way she did this time around. It’s like he wasn't even looking forward to what might happen next, he was just leaning entirely on what had already gone down in the past... 🤷

It’s pretty much the same deal when you look at how people act in society... A con artist, for instance, isn't exactly sitting around planning on getting caught, because if they were, they wouldn't bother starting the scam in the first place. Once they pull it off just once, they basically spend the rest of their time just hoping they can catch that same lightning in a bottle again...
Honestly, it’s all just one big gamble at this point, because we aren't even in a position to... predicting... Everything that could possibly go wrong in the future... you know, some people just sit there and consciously factor every single potential risk into their daily behavior, and then they end up spiraling into these endless loops of overthinking every possible scenario, even though obsessing over those hypothetical disasters doesn't actually provide any real guarantee that what they're imagining will ever actually happen...

excellent Quote

I’ve been thinking lately that human consciousness actually exists across all different planes at once... You see so many people just stuck living in the past, trapped in old memories and constantly mourning things they can't change no matter how much they wish they could. Then you have those who spend their entire lives just waiting for some future event to happen—clinging to hopes that might never even materialize, which is a pretty heavy way to live... But honestly, the best path belongs to those who consciously build their existence right here in the present, because only they truly possess the free will required to decide what kind of life they want to create.
(Of course, when I say "the present," I’m talking about it in a conversational sense, not suggesting that the present doesn't exist in a physical way, since by the time you've even finished a thought, it's already slipped into the past...)

I bolded the parts I think matter.
A scam isn't just about planning; it's about using what happened before. We aren't just talking about the present or future anymore—we're bringing the past into it.
Bottom line: Baboon used his past experience to make a calculated guess about the future just to get fed right now. He banked on how his mom and Mel would react.

It’s the same in human society. A con artist doesn't plan on getting caught; if they did, they wouldn't bother scamming in the first place. If they pulled it off once, they just hope lightning strikes twice.

But the whole point of a scam is minimizing risk. Being able to foresee every single thing that could go wrong is what makes a con artist skilled. And to be skilled, you have to be smart. Idiots pull stupid scams that fail every single time.

I believe human consciousness exists on all levels.

👍

Bradley Hayes36 said:Conscience doesn't give a damn about cheating someone else... it only kicks in when you do something that fails your own internal bullshit standards. I could be a complete lunatic and decide that murder is actually a righteous act, and if my own twisted logic says it’s fine, my conscience wouldn't feel a single thing...
It’s like that old story about Robin Hood... he’s nothing but a thief, yet everyone sides with him, even himself, because he’s convinced his own brand of chaos is actually doing some kind of good...

If the victim doesn't even realize they’ve been taken for a ride, then calling it a scam is a stretch... because if you can make a fraud look like a legitimate deal, it could pass for anything at all. But once you actually realize you've been played, that's when the whole thing falls apart and the con truly fails...

So, we’re back to playing philosopher again, I guess... which means we're talking about deception, three people involved, and this whole mess. Now, you think you managed to pull one over on me? Honestly, I didn't even realize I was being played, but if Mark looks at this as a neutral observer, there isn't any actual payoff for anyone yet... not right now, anyway. In that exact moment, sure, the scam worked. But five minutes later, Mark could just turn to me and say, "Hey, you got cheated," and suddenly the whole thing falls apart. He could stay silent forever and the scam stays successful, or he could go straight to you, tell you what happened, and suggest you split the loot fifty-fifty, and the scam still technically works... but the fact that you're feeling the squeeze of blackmail right now? You can thank Mark for that...

So, I went back and reworked this post... tweaked the angle, expanded my thoughts about five times over just to make sure I actually said what I meant...

Spot on. Conscience is just our own moral yardstick. But I’m looking at the cultural roots of guilt when it comes to deception. In any society, cheating is viewed negatively. On one hand, society punishes the cheater; on the other, the very social fabric (what Marx would call the superstructure) is built to trigger guilt in the person doing the lying.
Basically, does a baboon feel guilty after a scam?

If the victim doesn't realize they've been conned—if it looks totally legitimate—then it's a different story. But if you find out you were played, then the scam failed.

Deception is interesting specifically because it's complicated. At some level, it turns into manipulation where even the person pulling the strings doesn't realize they're lying. They convince themselves they're doing the right thing. But that isn't a scam. That's just delusion.
A scam requires intent.

That's getting philosophical again, which is the whole point. Let's say there are three people involved. You trick me, and I don't know it yet. But Mark is standing there as a neutral observer. He sees everything, but he gains nothing—at that moment, the scam worked. But five minutes later, Mark tells me I've been had. Now the scam failed. Or maybe he stays silent forever and the scam succeeds. Or maybe he tells us both and we split the loot fifty-fifty—still a success. If you end up being blackmailed later, blame Mark.

The one who cheats the sea has to account for the "Mark factor." If he's unpredictable, the whole scam becomes unstable.

I actually ended up rewriting this post five times while typing it, trying to refine my point.

Slow down. I usually just write the first thing that pops into my head. Usually, it's the best version anyway. Why overthink it? We're just talking. Even if we mess up, Freddie isn't going to come after us. 😍
Just that jerk executioner. 😁

redtinker36 said:.. the whole narrative is broken .. humanity didn't possess the consciousness of deception for thousands of years .. and long before we understood how to cheat, we understood the reality of raw force ..
.. this story is just an attempt to justify the world as it is .. which makes it part of a twisted ideology ..
.. consciousness evolves .. and the version we hold today won't be the one that exists tomorrow ..
.. yet, we can start building tomorrow's consciousness right now .. through prayer ..
.. damn it, God ..

Truth. It’s like trying to catch the wind with your bare hands. But if consciousness wants to actually grasp something, it has to grab it, flip it over, smell it, taste it, weigh it, and then finally make up its mind.
He's basically taking snapshots of a concept, killing it in the process, because that's the only way he thinks he can prove reality exists right now.
Explain this "consciousness of power" bit.🙂

Bradley Hayes36 said:To pull off a real scam, you need actual intelligence, wit, and a functioning brain...
Baboon pulled it off because he was smart, which doesn't mean that if he ever hits a situation
like the one rustymaker5 described just now—say his mother passes away and he gets kicked out on the street—that he won't find a way to survive...
Because being unintelligent is basically an inability to adapt, whereas the opposite means you'll figure it out, and clearly those students and professors involved in that Forbes scandal weren't quite smart enough to fleece the government successfully.
In my view, to execute a perfect scam—meaning the victim has no idea they've been had, because once they realize it, the game is over—you have to be incredibly sharp...
And it’s impossible to truly scam yourself; you can make mistakes or misinterpret things, but you can't actually deceive yourself...

"It would be interesting to consider the level at which human consciousness exists. As a whole entity connected to the future (a constant 'deception'), as an entity existing in the present that only utilizes imagined future scenarios when an interest arises, or is the human mind constantly in the future because perceiving a frozen present is simply impossible."

This is my first post here, so sorry for quoting you like this, I just didn't really grasp where you were going with that...
What exactly defines a scam to you?

Are you talking about the kind of mental makeup someone needs so they don't feel guilty after conning someone (conscience), or are you saying we're always thinking ahead, and when we have a goal or an interest, we just redirect our thoughts toward fulfilling it? Please clarify...

👍excellent Quote

In my opinion, to pull off a perfect scam—meaning the victim has no idea they've been conned, because once they realize it, it's not a scam anymore—you have to be incredibly sharp.

What defines a perfect scam? The victim stays clueless, or the whole thing is executed so smoothly it looks totally legitimate.😁

It's also impossible for a person to cheat themselves. They can make mistakes or think differently, but they can't deceive themselves.

I agree, though we don't necessarily have to be right. Right now, I can't wrap my head around self-deception, but reality is messier than that. The line isn't that clear. It’s more like a gray area.

This is my first post, so sorry for quoting like this; I didn't quite catch where you were heading with this.

You'll manage. Every journey starts with a single step.

So, what's your definition of a scam?

It seems important to me. But I'm not ready to commit to a formal definition just yet.

Are you talking about the mental state required to not feel guilty when you cheat someone (conscience), or are you talking about how we constantly shift our focus toward a goal or interest? Please clarify.

I'm on a tiny laptop, so typing is a pain. I can't get away from my kids to use my other computers.
Good catch on the connection between cheating and conscience.
It's funny how our conscience eats at us when we cheat a person, but when we trick an animal (like a baboon), we find it amusing. It implies that conscience is purely a cultural construct.

rustymaker5 said:And I have to wonder, why do so many people walk around so deeply dissatisfied with who they are and the lives they’ve built? 🤷

Take those kids at a top-tier business school, for instance... if they breeze through to graduation by cutting corners and cheating their way through exams, do you really think that’s going to serve them in the real world? They won't have the actual knowledge, they won't have learned the value of integrity, and they’ll never feel that genuine sense of accomplishment or self-worth... isn't that just the ultimate form of self-deception?
The professors are no different, really. Why bother spending years studying and committing to teaching others, only to turn around and peddle ignorance and incompetence for a meager paycheck? Aren't they betraying themselves, and the very noble ideals that led them to academia in the first place?
And what about the person who spends their entire career grinding away at a job they absolutely loathe? Aren't they essentially lying to themselves every single day?
Or consider a woman staying with an abusive husband... isn't she deceiving herself by constantly inventing excuses to justify staying in such a marriage?
Isn't there a profound self-deception in the person who spends their whole life compulsively hoarding material wealth, under the delusion that stuff will eventually lead to fulfillment or happiness?

Even that young kid you mentioned in your opening post... he might be falling for the same trap. What happens if his mother passes away and he realizes he never actually learned how to take care of himself because he always chose the path of least resistance? He'll find himself cast out by society, completely unprepared because he was raised to let everyone else fight his battles for him...🤷

Man, rustymaker5, you’re spot on, but I don't care about that kind of cheating.
I’m interested in something else.
What specific conditions does consciousness need to meet before it can actually start pulling a fast one?
Take the baboon example.
1. He’d need the ability to predict how other baboons—his mother, in this case—will react. He has to gauge her response.
2. He needs some concept of "self" versus "other," especially since the goal is getting food the easy way.
3. He needs a visual perception of future events—his screaming leading to the mother arriving, her reaction, driving Mel away, leaving the scene, and finally eating the rhizomes once Mel is gone.
4. All of this points to the existence of a plan, which means contemplating a situation that doesn't exist in the present, but in the future.

The way consciousness behaves here raises questions about the relationship between "I" and "him"—is it imitation, or stepping into someone else's shoes? It involves a feedback loop back to the self, pondering the ultimate consequences for the self—getting the food—and, most importantly to me, the presence of intent (consciousness) to lie—screaming as if there's actual danger.
Sure, a baboon is a primitive example, and when you apply this to humans, it takes on a much larger dimension. It would be interesting to consider what level human consciousness actually exists on. Is it a whole entity fused with the future (a constant "cheat"), an entity that exists in the present and only uses future scenarios when it serves an interest, or is the human mind permanently stuck in the future because perceiving a frozen "present" is impossible?

rustymaker5 said:Well, look, this little baboon was actually quite clever at getting what he wanted. We can probably assume that as he grows up, he’ll refine that whole system—assuming no one reads his mind and stops him—and eventually become a real pro at manipulation...😁
But honestly, a deception always requires two players—the one pulling the strings and the one being played. Take, for instance, that whole scandal involving Index and The Wall Street Journal. Both sides, the students and the professors alike, essentially signed up for the fraud (which meant they ended up playing both the deceiver and the victim simultaneously). To me, it feels like they were mostly just deceiving themselves, though I suppose that still leaves a mark on society as a whole...
As for whether deception matters in the development of human consciousness, I'd say absolutely, because it's in those moments where a person chooses to act either for or against dishonesty, and in doing so, they forge their own awareness of themselves and the world at large...

Interesting point.
We always say that by trying to cheat others, we end up cheating ourselves. But can you actually cheat yourself?

Ronald Rogers27 said:Here’s my take on it... The core engine behind human progress is Interest. I'm not talking about some rigid theorem—some people get way too fanatical about those—but rather a heuristic. Basically, if you look at the stats, there's a massive deviation here; we're talking a majority of the population, easily over 90%, who weigh every single move they make against their own self-interest. 😬

So, for that vast majority to turn that interest into something tangible—you know, cold hard cash—they have to engage in marketing. They have to package themselves and their skills to sell them on the open market... just so the whole system of retail can actually function! 👍

And let's be real: retail is just a legalized scam. It's a deception backed by the law and protected by the state. 😍

I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions based on my philosophy. 🙂

Ronald Rogers27

Picture an early human. They belong to a primate species defined by complex social structures, yet they lack any specialized physical edge. They can't sprint like a cheetah, they don't have an elephant's trunk, eagle vision, or a cobra's venomous bite. All they have is a highly developed brain featuring a well-evolved Broc area for language. But that brain is trapped in a body with relatively harmless limbs—limbs that became useless once the forests retreated and the open plains took over, leaving them exposed to all sorts of dangers.
How do you survive?
In my view, survival in that scenario requires one thing:

Predicting how predators and competitors behave. It’s basically the "what would I do if I were him" mindset. The reality is that our consciousnesses are remarkably similar, reacting to various situations in pretty much the same way. To even pull off that kind of mental projection, you have to establish a relationship of "me vs. him" or "me vs. them." In the situation I'm describing, Paul pulled off a sophisticated deception based exactly on that logic. He knew that if he started acting like there was danger, his mother would come running to chase off Mel, leaving him free to eat the rhizome. His brain had to step out of the present moment and dive straight into the future. The entire scenario was already mapped out in his head; he just had to execute it.

"Paul, a young baboon, stepped up to watch Mel, an adult female, as she dug through the hard, dry earth looking for rhizomes to eat. Paul looked around; the rest of the troop was nowhere to be seen in the rolling grasslands, though they couldn't have been far. Then, he let out a loud scream—something baboons usually only do when they're in real trouble. Within seconds, Paul's mother, who's Mel's superior, came charging in, chased her off, and both of them cleared out. Paul just wandered forward and started snacking on the rhizome himself."

Richard Leakey and Roger Laven - Rethinking Origins - Man's Search for Meaning - p. 246 Penguin Random House 2005.

It’s pretty clear that in this case, we're looking at a very "sophisticated" bit of deception, even by a baboon's standards.
So, what defines a "deception" to you? And how much weight do you give its role in the evolution of human consciousness?

briskmoose7 said:Willpower is just another instinct—just like sex, which exists purely for reproduction. It’s all normal. We manipulate things to reach some higher goal that someone else set for us. Honestly? I think the primary drive is sexual urge, and every other instinct or sub-instinct is just a tool to get us closer to fulfilling it. That's the only way a species survives, right? And that survival must be for some greater purpose. Because of that, the entire planet is basically acting like one giant greenhouse incubator designed for that exact purpose.

So what, you get hungry because you're horny?🤔

dustyskipper3 said:There isn't really a shared frame of reference that works for both the sender and the receiver. But we are talking about realized information here. For instance, if you have 20 GB on a hard drive, you technically possess that amount of potential information, even if it hasn't been fully utilized—and even if it has, the question remains whether it was ever actually transmitted or if anyone will even be able to make sense of it a few thousand years from now. It's like hieroglyphics; those texts inside the pyramids were messages waiting to be read, but before Champollion cracked the code, we just didn't know. Theoretically, maybe the information regarding the entire universe is already written down and we could read it if we managed to decode a universal cipher (kind of like genetic code), but I suppose we don't even have the theoretical time required to read it all. The lifespan of the universe is shorter than what would be needed to transmit all its data, especially since the universe is constantly expanding and the sheer volume of information keeps growing. So, we might potentially have access to all that data, but in reality, we're mostly just guessing.😉

That’s why we rely so heavily on simplifications and metaphors; we simply don't have the time to convey the full scope of information. And honestly, a human being—or the mind, specifically—can't even grasp the complete information about itself, though maybe some sort of superior intellect could. These kinds of informational paradoxes... I guess they make the whole thing feel a bit mystical.

To truly perceive something, you need both a subjective and an objective distance from reality. The subjective part is easy to grasp since each of us creates our own. The objective part is much more complicated; it's supposed to represent the intersection of all those subjective distances. So, the question is: is science actually capable of transmitting the objectivity of the past when examining a problem, or is every scientific "objective" view colored by the subjectivity of the person using it? In short, can a modern person truly reproduce the past in its entirety, rather than just a sequence of events?

Well, I suppose that comes down to how much a person understands themselves and their own subjectivity. In that case, one could treat themselves like a flawed measuring instrument and try to "calibrate" themselves to be more objective. It's a bit like aiming a rifle at a target; if you see you're hitting low, you adjust your aim upward. Similarly, a person might realize they have a tendency toward being overly optimistic or exaggerating things, so they correct their subjective assessment by a certain factor to reach something closer to the truth. It’s a shame people don't know themselves better; there would probably be a lot less nonsense and conflict in the world.😉😁

Maybe will is just a drive toward objectivity?

It’s difficult, I guess, because it’s usually tied up in ego perception. But maybe—and this is just a thought—if a person manages to rise above the egoic perception that keeps them from a total psychological breakdown and actually achieves that Jungian "self," where they are fully integrated with the universe, then their will could become a need for objectivity. You know, a drive for understanding, for grasping truth, for the essence of things. Since the universe doesn't have an ego, and God probably doesn't either—because God wouldn't need an ego to protect a fragile mind from reality when He *is* that reality—then it follows that the will of the universe and the will of a human in an ego-perceptive state are essentially at odds. A person lives in an illusion of duality, whereas the universe does not. Humans need distance to perceive things (subject vs. object), but the universe or God doesn't. So, this question of will is quite interesting, really. It sets us apart from nature, and maybe that's where the need for religion comes from—as a will to return to nature by transcending basic ego perception and building that "self." But that's more like the second topic you brought up.

I think I was referring to your (and my) understanding of the "archaeology" of the past earlier. You don't necessarily have to look toward the future.
I realize my way of thinking is strictly subjectivist, but, honestly, I just can't seem to step outside of it. It means that, on some deeper level, every individual possesses their own private language that our so-called consensus language can only crudely approximate. There are things I have in my head, but I simply lack the words to express them. However, in a human sense, to satisfy my curiosity (well, what even is curiosity?), I have to possess will. And curiosity is tied back to perception and the senses. What is the end result of all that?😕

Curiosity also seems to stem from this illusion of being separate from nature; it feels like a function of the left hemisphere, the rational side, while imagination belongs to the right.

But what exactly is matter?
As far as we can tell, it stops at the level of atoms. All those other particles are just pure mathematical constructs that undoubtedly exist, yet they can't really be called "matter." For instance, a graviton is just a description of the curvature of spacetime. If it isn't matter, then what is it?
Maybe it's just a consequence of us only seeing one face of the god Janus, while the other remains forever hidden from us?
To go back to Scholasticism: if there exists a Prime Mover or an Unmoved Mover, does the very act of motion represent an act of will?

Whatever leaves a trace in a bubble chamber certainly exists, unless we're talking about ghosts. 😬 But the issue is that it doesn't always exist as a particle. Sometimes it's a wave. Or a superposition. This idea about Janus seems right to me; if we could see the full picture, the whole world might look deterministically "lifeless"—we could describe it entirely—but because of quantum effects, a piece of the information always escapes us at the microscopic level. We're left with nothing but statistics. Does the act of motion represent an act of will... hmm... 🤷 theoretically speaking, without dimensions, there is no motion. Perhaps the emergence of something from nothing is an act of will, though to me, it feels more like an act of self-recognition, a desire for life, and will comes later. So, will cannot exist without a mover. Maybe original self-awareness is the Prime Mover that creates matter and the information upon that matter, but motion would imply converting potential energy into kinetic energy, which requires that potential energy exists first, born from that initial self-awareness.

I find these concepts of dark matter and dark energy to be quite strange... perhaps even a bit mysterious, if I'm being honest. It’s somewhat unsettling to think that they account for about 75% of the entire universe, yet we don't actually have any idea what they truly are. We seem to be grasping at straws. At the same time, there is this intense drive to formulate a "Theory of Everything," like string theory, which feels almost ambitious given our current gaps in knowledge. Maybe dark energy could just be Einstein's cosmological constant, but as for dark matter... I guess we're still largely in the dark on that one too.
I guess I'm having a bit of a hard time... seeing how those two concepts actually tie back to the whole idea of will that we've been discussing. It's a little difficult to bridge the gap there, maybe.

Perhaps there is some sort of latent potential energy—some undefined cosmic self-awareness, I suppose—that wants to act as the driver instead of that original prime mover. Right now, it seems to be working against the prime mover's will, since it’s accelerating the expansion of the universe and just increasing entropy... though I guess the prime mover's will would likely lean toward creating order within the cosmos. Dark energy doesn't strike me as a creative force; it feels more like something destructive, moving us toward this "Big Rip" scenario where the universe just tears itself apart through infinite expansion. But, maybe that won't actually happen. Perhaps the universe will eventually stabilize at some level, and maybe even we, as intelligent beings possessing our own agency, could somehow contribute to bringing order to the universe.

But, I guess... why would rationality be considered a limitation? I still don't quite see what could possibly take its place if we're actually trying to grasp the world objectively. It seems... well, it’s only natural that things feel mystical.

Mystery is a marvel, I suppose... though miracles rarely seem to follow any kind of symmetry.

Ugh, you should really tell that to the people posting all about sacred geometry over on those magic and mysticism forums.😍 I suppose I actually have a bit of a theory regarding the rationality behind the various PDFs being circulated on this forum, though I think I’ll hold off on sharing it for now. I wouldn't want anyone to take offense or feel targeted by my observations, I guess. 😁 If we look at this through the lens of calibration theory, mysticism essentially assumes that humans are inherently irrational beings. Because of that, any subjective conclusion someone tries to turn into an objective fact has to be calibrated against their own level of irrationality. But... I guess there’s a bit of a paradox there. How can an irrational subject actually calibrate their own irrationality? It seems like the distortion of reality could just end up getting even worse, right? Maybe that’s why mystical self-perception puts the individual right at the center, calibrating everything around themselves instead of calibrating themselves against the world. If someone doesn't like that approach, they can just walk away, I suppose. Or, if they enjoy being a follower, they can join the ranks of those following a guru. In the end, it all feels quite asymmetrical. Even the information shared is asymmetrical—the guru holds all the data and the key to decoding it, while the followers are left with nothing. They exist in completely separate reference frames, and I think they can only ever meet through some kind of mystical union.

Can matter actually be considered information? I mean, just a thought... like, maybe an electron isn't even a "real" thing until we actually go out and measure it. I guess it's possible that what we call matter is really just data being processed. It's a bit of a heavy concept, I suppose. Maybe.

It’s only a possibility, I suppose. But then again, even information sitting on a computer isn't really actual until you actually open the program. And who knows, maybe the whole thing just freezes up mid-way through... you can never really tell.

In my own version of reality, I suppose God could only ever be a poet. It would mean being fundamentally out of sync with existence, I guess. Do you think it’s possible that Virginia Woolf's "waves" might actually wash against the shores of Borges's Aleph?

Well, I suppose I mentioned Virginia as an example, mostly because I tend to view God as a being entirely devoid of an ego-driven perspective. It’s more like a pure stream of consciousness, which, at its absolute best, might only be expressed through something like "I am that which I am." So, I guess there are significant hurdles regarding any concept of an "I" or a localized sense of self. On the other hand, perhaps that divinity incarnates within us, allowing itself to be viewed through our own limited ego-lens—almost like a single drop in a vast ocean, just one tiny part of a grander Aleph being washed over by the waves of an immense, divine existence.

There’s this idea, I suppose, that everything follows a cycle—that there is always a beginning and an end—yet at the same time, we are beings without any real limits.😁

Maybe the start and the finish are actually the exact same thing... kind of like a palindrome that reads just the same whether you go forward or backward.😉

Yeah, but what does "potentially" even mean? I’m not "potentially" a man, and the sun isn't "potentially" a sun. We exist. We are facts. We function as information—or better yet, storage for information. Potentiality isn't reality. It’s just a limbo that can lead you straight to hell if you aren't careful. Information—just like stocks—doesn't actually become real until it hits the market. What's the point of the age or size of the universe if a single thought from me can wrap itself around the whole damn thing?

We constantly lean on shortcuts and metaphors because we just don't have the bandwidth to process the full picture. Even the human mind can't actually wrap itself around its own complete data set, even though some theoretical "superior intellect" could. These information paradoxes are exactly what make the whole thing feel so mystical.

👍
If we knew everything, life would be incredibly boring—absolutely mind-numbing. And that’s exactly why God can't be perfect. Maybe "will" is just a desperate reach for perfection?🤷

Look, it all comes down to how much a person actually understands themselves and their own bias. If you can actually recognize your own subjectivity, you can treat yourself like a faulty measuring tool and "calibrate" your perspective to get closer to the truth. It’s just like shooting a rifle at a target—if you realize your aim is pulling low, you adjust your sights upward to compensate. It's the same thing here. If you know you have a tendency to be overly optimistic or prone to exaggerating, you factor that in, adjust your internal math by a certain margin, and suddenly you're seeing things more objectively. Honestly, if people were just better at self-awareness, there would be a hell of a lot less bullshit and conflict in this world. 😉😁

Didn't Nietzsche talk about this? Something along the lines of: In order to love others, I first have to love myself.
How do you calibrate yourself to be more objective?
Through knowledge?

It’s tough, because objectivity is usually tied up in ego perception. But maybe if a person moves past the egoic view—the one that just protects them from a psychological breakdown—and achieves that Jungian "self" where they are fully integrated with the universe, then their will becomes a drive for objectivity. A drive for understanding, for truth, for the core of things. Since the universe doesn't have an ego, and neither does Bog, because Bog doesn't need an ego to shield a fragile mind from reality (since He *is* reality), then the will of the universe and the will of a human in an ego-state are basically opposites. Humans live in an illusion of duality; the universe doesn't. We need distance to perceive things (subject vs. object), but Bog doesn't. So this question of "will" is pretty interesting. It sets us apart from nature, and maybe that's why there's a need for religion—as a way to return to nature by moving past basic ego perception to build the "self." But that's the other topic you brought up.

That implies we are the only ones striving for objectivity. Bog is terrifyingly subjective.
That sounds like some scholastic wordplay. Is divine subjectivity something existing outside of nature? Analogy: Nature (and us included) would be the body, but not the head.

Curiosity also stems from that illusion of being separate from nature. It's a function of the left hemisphere (rational), while imagination is a function of the right.

Is curiosity a precursor to the will, or its protector?

Maybe it's the potential energy of some undefined cosmic self-awareness that wants to be the mover instead of the Prime Mover. Right now, it acts like it's opposing the Prime Mover's will because it accelerates the expansion of the universe and increases entropy (whereas the Mover's will likely aims for order). Dark energy doesn't feel like a creative will to me; it feels destructive, pushing toward a "Big Rip"—where the universe tears itself apart through sudden, infinite expansion. It probably won't actually happen, though. The universe will likely stabilize, and maybe we, as intelligent beings with our own will, can contribute to bringing order to it.

Is man God?
Maybe the universe only truly becomes a "universe" the moment someone observes it.
On the other hand, aside from abstract thought, man is entirely a part of that universe.

I used Virginia as an example because I see Bog as a being without an ego-perspective. It's just a flow of consciousness that, at best, can be described as "I am that I am." There are huge issues with the concept of "I" and the experience of the self. On the other hand, it can incarnate within us, allowing us to look at things from an ego perspective—like being a single part of an Aleph being washed over by waves of massive divine identity.

But we don't function like Virginia's waves. We are a river of individual consciousnesses rolling and tumbling along. An Aleph—the most perfect letter where everything is concentrated—would be the total opposite of those waves. An Aleph would be a metaphor for ultimate community, not individuality.

Maybe the beginning is also the end—like a palindrome you can read both ways.😉

Logic, math, philosophy... it all has to be simple. Complexity is just for idiots.

dustyskipper3 said:I think I follow your line of reasoning. In that view, a human being isn't some cosmic mistake or an extra; rather, we are a possibility that just happened to manifest. It’s similar to how life itself was a potentiality that eventually came to be. I suppose the universe wasn't inherently intelligent or sentient at the very beginning, but its fundamental parameters contained the potential for those things, which eventually realized themselves. Early life was likely quite simple and barely intelligent—it might have been incredibly improbable that it would ever reach this level of cognitive complexity, but yet, here we are. What we really need to determine is whether this is truly an astronomical fluke. We have to ask if the anthropic principle within the universe is a wild, near-insane assumption, or if it's something reasonably probable, or perhaps even something inevitable that simply must occur. Your position seems to be the first one—that it's a freak occurrence. The religious perspective would be the last one, where it's certain. As for me, I land somewhere in the middle. I guess I'm a bit closer to your view, though perhaps only because I can't bring myself to believe I am so "exceptional" that the mere possibility of my existence had to be such a staggering improbability.

I hope you won't take offense, but I suppose... if I had to break down your perspective, I see it like this:

Heraclitus once said that everything flows, and I suppose you could say life and this whole world are constantly evolving toward some kind of direction. It seems to me that the act of creation is something uniquely human. Other living creatures—well, except maybe in extremely primitive circumstances—they don't really create; they just adapt. Only humans seem to take their environment and reshape it to suit themselves. If we were to take that logic and apply it to a higher plane, then maybe we could imagine that "someone" similar to a human being created this entire world. Of course, a religious God feels far too anthropomorphic, and if I try to dig into those specific motives, I feel like I'm stepping right into the realm of the absurd. From a purely scientific standpoint, I guess God doesn't exist, mostly because such a being couldn't possibly encompass the logical system of specialized disciplines that modern science is built upon. Science's absolute limit is perhaps imagining the universe as a massive computer, or maybe like some deterministic clock that was wound up at one single moment and has just been ticking away ever since. In either of those scenarios, I suspect we don't actually possess free will; it might all just be an illusion.
Maybe we should start by just... assuming that humans actually possess free will? I mean, if we take that as a given, would we even need God? Or perhaps the idea of the universe acting like some sort of massive, multidimensional supercomputer? It makes me wonder if all those complex theories about multi-dimensional realms would still be necessary if we truly had agency over our own choices. I guess it’s worth considering.

I find myself constantly dwelling on the idea that viewing a computer as a metaphor for the universe might just be a byproduct of our current cultural obsession with technology. It feels... I don't know, quite normal, actually. Every civilization seems to describe the universe and God based on its own fundamental settings and core characteristics. I suppose primitive tribes might see those patterns in lightning strikes or sudden storms. So, when you ask me this, you’re essentially asking if I am capable of stepping outside my own civilization to view things through the lens of some non-existent culture. I honestly don't know if I'm up to that. Maybe one would have to be God to truly achieve that kind of perspective. Even someone like Nostradamus—if his prophecies hold any water—had to interpret everything from the viewpoint of a medieval person. We can't truly grasp his meaning today because we can't fully inhabit his mind, or know exactly how much he knew versus what we know now. I suspect that simply trying to wrap one's head around what life was like for an ordinary person in a past era—say, Classical Rome, the Maya, or even any other non-Western society—would be enough to occupy the entire working life of a hyper-intelligent individual. Just to establish a boundary between "us" and "them," so we don't fall into the trap of viewing foreign cultures through a Western lens, but rather seeing them as they saw themselves. One would have to pore over their writings and study archaeological finds to get it right. And now, you're asking me to imagine some sort of archaeology of the future, stretching to the very end of time, to extract the essential elements of every single civilization and somehow conclude which one offers the most optimal picture of the universe? I... I'm not sure I can manage that. 😉🤷

But how can you even separate information from matter? If there isn't any matter present, then there’s nothing there—which means there's no information either. I mean, it's one thing mathematically to talk about an empty set, but it's quite another to actually have that empty set existing in reality. Information is a relationship. And if there is no matter, then there aren't any relationships (or connections) to speak of.
That whole concept regarding "virtual particles" popping in and out of a vacuum... I've never really liked it. I suppose I should admit that's just a gut feeling, since I don't think I have enough physical or philosophical training to truly explain why.

Well, look at it this way. To me, modern physics seems to be suggesting something entirely new about matter. Specifically, that matter isn't everything, and the vacuum isn't actually empty. There is this quantum vacuum where particles emerge in a sense, but those particles aren't quite "matter" yet. So, you have matter, you have nothingness, but then there's also this middle ground—a kind of "superposition" of matter and nothingness. It's like "some stuff" that isn't quite matter yet, but isn't strictly "nothing" anymore. Take the graviton, for instance; we can't detect it as a particle, so it isn't matter, but it certainly isn't nothing because it can exert a pull on matter. The existence of the graviton, or even dark matter, is definitely a form of information within the universe. In that light, I suspect the total amount of information in the universe is much greater than what is carried by matter itself. From that, I tend to conclude that information comes before matter; perhaps it somehow programs the matter, which then uses that matter to generate even more information. Though, I guess it's impossible to define exactly "what information is," since information is essentially the relationship between things. Therefore, information exists even when nothing else does, because that is the information regarding the relationship of that nothingness to the nothingness it resides in (or doesn't😁). That's why information is the absolute starting point; there can't be anything more fundamental than that. Is it God, then? Not exactly, but maybe it possesses a "will" to expand, or perhaps some kind of "self-awareness." 😬

Of course, all of this sounds very mystical, much like the idea of virtual particles, and a rational mind would naturally push back against it. A rational mind wants to find some tangible "stuff" that everything is made of—something solid to rely on. Personally, I lean more toward a Buddhist perspective where everything is essentially nothing, yet even that "nothingness" is actually something, because the fact that everything is nothing constitutes a piece of "information" in itself.

In my view, logic is one thing. There isn't some higher logic. There is only a level of knowledge (information) where, in 99% of cases, we are using almost the exact same logic our ancestors used twenty thousand years ago. Einstein's General Relativity isn't an example of new logic, but rather a new perspective. The logic remains old, even if the results (our understanding) are staggering.

See, if the brain were merely "matter," it wouldn't be able to be "filled" with such vast amounts of new information, unless information is the "stuff" that absolutely dominates over matter.

You, much like myself, seem to enjoy playing with absolutes.
That's true; in General Relativity, spacetime (the background) is the absolute, while everything else is relative. Now, you are taking information as your absolute (though I wonder, what exactly *is* information?) and, based on the logic of its origin, concluding that the universe might be a computer. Meanwhile, I am taking the human being as my absolute—not in a biological or anthropocentric sense, but in terms of our sheer strangeness and our sense of not belonging to this world.
The Turing machine... I suppose it’s just proof that logic and intelligence alone can't quite grasp the entire universe. And if they can't, then what can? Maybe poetry?

Poetry feels like information about that "nothingness" from which everything emerged. It doesn't go looking for God; instead, it creates everything out of nothing and just marvels at that void. That's why I think poetry is essentially more fundamental than religion. People tend to attach all sorts of religious, scientific, or cultural baggage to it, turning it into this messy soup where the core essence gets lost. But in poetry, for it to truly be itself, that core—that emptiness—is actually the most vital part. It's like a poet standing on a gallows, much like Villon, just laughing and singing about the sheer absurdity of existence.

But we end up back at the same question again. Does there have to be a reason for everything to exist?

It doesn't necessarily have to, though maybe there is a will involved.

That sounds good, I guess.👍
Yet, we find ourselves facing Hegel's unmoving mover once more. What actually constitutes the beginning?

I suspect it's a paradox. Perhaps the universe never actually "began" in any real sense, and it won't ever truly vanish either. Maybe it's all just one big illusion; there is no start or finish, we are just limited beings whose minds insist that everything requires a beginning and an end.

Personally, I find this fascinating. Cosmology is really the crown jewel of science these days. Why is the universe accelerating its expansion? What happens, say, in 100 billion years? Is the universe expanding because it possesses a will—where our own wills are merely Platonic shadows of that universal will—or is it just expanding nonsensically, pointlessly, without any explanation? I hope it isn't the latter; I want to believe in a reason. Otherwise, everything becomes meaningless, including our own will and desires, even if they are just primal impulses.

So, suddenly, dark energy emerges from "nothing." There has to be some kind of will present; the universe has a will, but that doesn't mean it possesses reason. Because of that, I guess people, acting as elements of reason, ought to master the forces of the universe to lend a bit of rationality to that expansion. 😍

Let me keep going.
You're spot on. You can only use metaphors—or any way of passing info along—based on actual experience. Think about it: an individual could try to describe the entire universe in their own private language, but that's completely worthless because it never reaches the status of actual information. For something to count as information, it has to have shared meaning or value. If there isn’t a receiver capable of reading and understanding it, then the information simply doesn't exist. Period.
Mark Torres14 said:

Are you actually asking if I’m capable of stepping outside my own civilization to view things through the lens of some non-existent society? I don't know if I am. Maybe I'd need to be a god to pull that off. Even Nostradamus had to interpret his "quatrains" from the perspective of a medieval man. We can't even fully grasp them today because we don't truly understand how a person from the Middle Ages thought—what they knew versus what we know now.

To truly understand anything, you need two things: subjective and objective distance from reality. We all get the subjective part—it’s the lens we personally build. But the objective side? That’s much harder. It’s supposed to be the intersection where all those individual biases cancel each other out. So here’s the real question: Can science actually capture the objectivity of the past when tackling a problem? Or is every "objective" scientific finding just stained by the subjectivity of the person holding the microscope? In short: Is it even possible for a person today to fully recreate the past, rather than just a hollow sequence of events?
Maybe "willpower" is just a fancy word for wanting to be objective.
Mark Torres14 said:

I honestly think you could spend an entire lifetime—a whole career for a genius, really—just trying to wrap your head around what daily life felt like for an average person in ancient civilizations. Think Greco-Roman, the Maya, or any non-Western culture out there. That alone is enough work. The goal is to draw a hard line between "us" and "them." You have to stop looking at history through a narrow, Western lens and actually try to see these worlds exactly how the people living in them saw them. You do that by digging through their own writings and studying the archaeology they left behind. But now, I’m being asked to play some kind of futuristic archaeologist? To scan every civilization from the beginning of time to the end of the world, strip everything down to its core elements, and somehow conclude which one provides the most "optimal" view of the universe? Give me a break. 😉🤷

I think I already laid out my take on how you—and I—interpret the "archaeology" of the past in that question above. You don't even need to look toward the future to see it.
Look, I know this is purely subjective, but I can't help it. At some deep level, every single person has their own private language that our standard way of speaking can only crudely approximate. It’s like there's this thing in my head, but I just don't have the words to get it out. And honestly, to satisfy my own curiosity—if you can even call it that—I need to have willpower. But curiosity itself is tied to perception and the senses. So what does that leave us with?😕
Quincy:

Here's how I see it. Modern physics is telling us something entirely new about matter. Basically, matter isn't everything, and a vacuum isn't truly empty. There’s this quantum vacuum where particles emerge, but those particles aren't quite "matter" yet. So, you've got matter, you've got nothingness, and then there's this middle ground—a sort of "superposition" of matter and nothing. Just "some stuff" that hasn't become matter but isn't "nothing" anymore. Take the graviton, for example. We can't detect it as a particle, so it isn't matter, but it certainly isn't nothing since it can pull on actual matter.

But what actually *is* matter?
As far as we know, it stops at the atomic level. Everything else is just a mathematical construct—they definitely exist, sure, but you wouldn't call them matter. A graviton is just a description of spacetime curvature. If it isn't matter, then what is it?
Maybe we're just looking at one side of Janus's face, while the rest stays hidden forever?
Let's go back to scholasticism. If there is a Prime Mover, or an Unmoved Mover, does the very act of movement imply an act of will?
Quincy:

The appearance of the graviton or "dark matter" is clearly some kind of information within the universe. Because of that, I think the total amount of information in the cosmos is way greater than what's carried by physical matter itself. My conclusion? Information comes before matter. It somehow programs the matter, which then uses that matter to generate even more information. But you can't really define "what information is," because information is just the relationship between things. Therefore, information exists even when nothing else does, because it's the information regarding the relationship of that nothingness to the nothingness it resides in (or doesn't😁). That makes information the absolute starting point; nothing can be more fundamental. Is it God? No. But maybe it has a "will" to expand, or even a kind of "self-awareness." 😬

Personally, these concepts of dark matter and dark energy feel incredibly weird and mysterious to me. They make up 75% of the universe, and we haven't a clue what they are. Meanwhile, we're out here trying to build a "Theory of Everything" using string theory. Fine, dark energy could be Einstein's cosmological constant, but what on earth is dark matter?
I'm having a hard time connecting those two ideas to the concept of "will" we're debating.
Quincy:

Of course, all of this sounds mystical, just like virtual particles, and a rational mind is going to push back against it. A logical mind wants solid "stuff"—actual matter it can rely on. Personally, I lean toward the Buddhist view: everything is essentially nothing, yet it isn't nothing, because the fact that everything is "nothing" is already a piece of "information."

But why would rationality be a limitation? I still don't see what else could possibly take its place if we're trying to understand the world objectively. Of course there's a mystical side to it.
Mysticism is a miracle, and miracles aren't symmetrical.

See, if the brain were just "matter," it wouldn't be able to "absorb" this much new information. That's only possible if information isn't just "stuff"—it has to dominate matter.

Can matter actually *be* information? Like, an electron doesn't even exist until we measure it.

Poetry is information about that "nothingness" everything came from. It doesn't hunt for God; it creates everything out of nothing and marvels at the void. That makes poetry more elemental than religion. Religion just tries to glue religious, scientific, and cultural baggage onto it until you get this messy soup where the core essence is stripped away. But for poetry to work, that core—the idea that everything is nothing—is exactly what matters. Think of a poet like Villon on the gallows, laughing and singing at the sheer absurdity of it all.

In my reality, God can only be a poet. A being that refuses to fit into reality. Do you think Vergil’s "waves" could ever crash against Borges' Aleph?

I think it's a paradox. Maybe the universe never actually "started" in any real sense, and it will never end. It's all an illusion. There is no beginning or end; we're just limited beings whose brains insist everything needs a start and a finish.

On the flip side, you have the idea that everything has a definite beginning and end, yet we are beings without limits.😁

dustyskipper3 said:I think I follow your line of reasoning. In that view, a human being isn't some cosmic mistake or an extra; rather, we are a possibility that just happened to manifest. It’s similar to how life itself was a potentiality that eventually came to be. I suppose the universe wasn't inherently intelligent or sentient at the very beginning, but its fundamental parameters contained the potential for those things, which eventually realized themselves. Early life was likely quite simple and barely intelligent—it might have been incredibly improbable that it would ever reach this level of cognitive complexity, but yet, here we are. What we really need to determine is whether this is truly an astronomical fluke. We have to ask if the anthropic principle within the universe is a wild, near-insane assumption, or if it's something reasonably probable, or perhaps even something inevitable that simply must occur. Your position seems to be the first one—that it's a freak occurrence. The religious perspective would be the last one, where it's certain. As for me, I land somewhere in the middle. I guess I'm a bit closer to your view, though perhaps only because I can't bring myself to believe I am so "exceptional" that the mere possibility of my existence had to be such a staggering improbability.

I hope you won't take offense, but I suppose... if I had to break down your perspective, I see it like this:

Heraclitus once said that everything flows, and I suppose you could say life and this whole world are constantly evolving toward some kind of direction. It seems to me that the act of creation is something uniquely human. Other living creatures—well, except maybe in extremely primitive circumstances—they don't really create; they just adapt. Only humans seem to take their environment and reshape it to suit themselves. If we were to take that logic and apply it to a higher plane, then maybe we could imagine that "someone" similar to a human being created this entire world. Of course, a religious God feels far too anthropomorphic, and if I try to dig into those specific motives, I feel like I'm stepping right into the realm of the absurd. From a purely scientific standpoint, I guess God doesn't exist, mostly because such a being couldn't possibly encompass the logical system of specialized disciplines that modern science is built upon. Science's absolute limit is perhaps imagining the universe as a massive computer, or maybe like some deterministic clock that was wound up at one single moment and has just been ticking away ever since. In either of those scenarios, I suspect we don't actually possess free will; it might all just be an illusion.
Maybe we should start by just... assuming that humans actually possess free will? I mean, if we take that as a given, would we even need God? Or perhaps the idea of the universe acting like some sort of massive, multidimensional supercomputer? It makes me wonder if all those complex theories about multi-dimensional realms would still be necessary if we truly had agency over our own choices. I guess it’s worth considering.

I find myself constantly dwelling on the idea that viewing a computer as a metaphor for the universe might just be a byproduct of our current cultural obsession with technology. It feels... I don't know, quite normal, actually. Every civilization seems to describe the universe and God based on its own fundamental settings and core characteristics. I suppose primitive tribes might see those patterns in lightning strikes or sudden storms. So, when you ask me this, you’re essentially asking if I am capable of stepping outside my own civilization to view things through the lens of some non-existent culture. I honestly don't know if I'm up to that. Maybe one would have to be God to truly achieve that kind of perspective. Even someone like Nostradamus—if his prophecies hold any water—had to interpret everything from the viewpoint of a medieval person. We can't truly grasp his meaning today because we can't fully inhabit his mind, or know exactly how much he knew versus what we know now. I suspect that simply trying to wrap one's head around what life was like for an ordinary person in a past era—say, Classical Rome, the Maya, or even any other non-Western society—would be enough to occupy the entire working life of a hyper-intelligent individual. Just to establish a boundary between "us" and "them," so we don't fall into the trap of viewing foreign cultures through a Western lens, but rather seeing them as they saw themselves. One would have to pore over their writings and study archaeological finds to get it right. And now, you're asking me to imagine some sort of archaeology of the future, stretching to the very end of time, to extract the essential elements of every single civilization and somehow conclude which one offers the most optimal picture of the universe? I... I'm not sure I can manage that. 😉🤷

But how can you even separate information from matter? If there isn't any matter present, then there’s nothing there—which means there's no information either. I mean, it's one thing mathematically to talk about an empty set, but it's quite another to actually have that empty set existing in reality. Information is a relationship. And if there is no matter, then there aren't any relationships (or connections) to speak of.
That whole concept regarding "virtual particles" popping in and out of a vacuum... I've never really liked it. I suppose I should admit that's just a gut feeling, since I don't think I have enough physical or philosophical training to truly explain why.

Well, look at it this way. To me, modern physics seems to be suggesting something entirely new about matter. Specifically, that matter isn't everything, and the vacuum isn't actually empty. There is this quantum vacuum where particles emerge in a sense, but those particles aren't quite "matter" yet. So, you have matter, you have nothingness, but then there's also this middle ground—a kind of "superposition" of matter and nothingness. It's like "some stuff" that isn't quite matter yet, but isn't strictly "nothing" anymore. Take the graviton, for instance; we can't detect it as a particle, so it isn't matter, but it certainly isn't nothing because it can exert a pull on matter. The existence of the graviton, or even dark matter, is definitely a form of information within the universe. In that light, I suspect the total amount of information in the universe is much greater than what is carried by matter itself. From that, I tend to conclude that information comes before matter; perhaps it somehow programs the matter, which then uses that matter to generate even more information. Though, I guess it's impossible to define exactly "what information is," since information is essentially the relationship between things. Therefore, information exists even when nothing else does, because that is the information regarding the relationship of that nothingness to the nothingness it resides in (or doesn't😁). That's why information is the absolute starting point; there can't be anything more fundamental than that. Is it God, then? Not exactly, but maybe it possesses a "will" to expand, or perhaps some kind of "self-awareness." 😬

Of course, all of this sounds very mystical, much like the idea of virtual particles, and a rational mind would naturally push back against it. A rational mind wants to find some tangible "stuff" that everything is made of—something solid to rely on. Personally, I lean more toward a Buddhist perspective where everything is essentially nothing, yet even that "nothingness" is actually something, because the fact that everything is nothing constitutes a piece of "information" in itself.

In my view, logic is one thing. There isn't some higher logic. There is only a level of knowledge (information) where, in 99% of cases, we are using almost the exact same logic our ancestors used twenty thousand years ago. Einstein's General Relativity isn't an example of new logic, but rather a new perspective. The logic remains old, even if the results (our understanding) are staggering.

See, if the brain were merely "matter," it wouldn't be able to be "filled" with such vast amounts of new information, unless information is the "stuff" that absolutely dominates over matter.

You, much like myself, seem to enjoy playing with absolutes.
That's true; in General Relativity, spacetime (the background) is the absolute, while everything else is relative. Now, you are taking information as your absolute (though I wonder, what exactly *is* information?) and, based on the logic of its origin, concluding that the universe might be a computer. Meanwhile, I am taking the human being as my absolute—not in a biological or anthropocentric sense, but in terms of our sheer strangeness and our sense of not belonging to this world.
The Turing machine... I suppose it’s just proof that logic and intelligence alone can't quite grasp the entire universe. And if they can't, then what can? Maybe poetry?

Poetry feels like information about that "nothingness" from which everything emerged. It doesn't go looking for God; instead, it creates everything out of nothing and just marvels at that void. That's why I think poetry is essentially more fundamental than religion. People tend to attach all sorts of religious, scientific, or cultural baggage to it, turning it into this messy soup where the core essence gets lost. But in poetry, for it to truly be itself, that core—that emptiness—is actually the most vital part. It's like a poet standing on a gallows, much like Villon, just laughing and singing about the sheer absurdity of existence.

But we end up back at the same question again. Does there have to be a reason for everything to exist?

It doesn't necessarily have to, though maybe there is a will involved.

That sounds good, I guess.👍
Yet, we find ourselves facing Hegel's unmoving mover once more. What actually constitutes the beginning?

I suspect it's a paradox. Perhaps the universe never actually "began" in any real sense, and it won't ever truly vanish either. Maybe it's all just one big illusion; there is no start or finish, we are just limited beings whose minds insist that everything requires a beginning and an end.

Personally, I find this fascinating. Cosmology is really the crown jewel of science these days. Why is the universe accelerating its expansion? What happens, say, in 100 billion years? Is the universe expanding because it possesses a will—where our own wills are merely Platonic shadows of that universal will—or is it just expanding nonsensically, pointlessly, without any explanation? I hope it isn't the latter; I want to believe in a reason. Otherwise, everything becomes meaningless, including our own will and desires, even if they are just primal impulses.

So, suddenly, dark energy emerges from "nothing." There has to be some kind of will present; the universe has a will, but that doesn't mean it possesses reason. Because of that, I guess people, acting as elements of reason, ought to master the forces of the universe to lend a bit of rationality to that expansion. 😍

Entropy is a trip. We have exactly one ordered state (the anthropic principle) and an infinite number of disordered ones. Our world exists only within that one ordered state, while all the others are just potential possibilities hanging out in a limbo of non-realization. Physicists try to sell us on the idea that our world is just one wild chance where "a bunch of monkeys randomly typing on typewriters" happens to crank out everything by Shakespeare, all while hiding behind entropy. They do this because explaining any other scenario would require them to admit there might be a specific purpose behind it all. Personally, the idea of such massive coincidences creeps me out. I'm much more comfortable with the idea of a multiverse where endless worlds exist side-by-side, or that our universe is just a single bubble in a boiling soup constantly churning out new universes.

Sorry. Got an urgent meeting.🙂
I'll pick this back up tonight or tomorrow.

dustyskipper3 said:If one were to somehow stumble upon an "anthropic principle" embedded within the fundamental laws of nature—say, tucked away inside string theory—wouldn't that lend some weight to the idea of intelligent design? I suppose... when I use the term "life," especially regarding humans, I am really referring to intelligence. Life seems to be a manifestation of intelligence, which implies a purposeful selection of sorts, which would mean there is some kind of mind behind the emergence of life. And if there is a mind, then perhaps there is also a will. I wonder, though... can true will exist in the universe without a mind to anchor it? Will implies a goal of some kind. So, maybe the ultimate purpose for life arising in the universe—shaped by this overarching mind—could actually be the creation of more minds within the physical universe. Minds that possess their own wills, capable of processing information, storing it, and making decisions based on what they learn. It's a lot to consider, I guess.

I suppose we aren't really debating God here, per se... it feels more like we are discussing pure information and this "autopoietic" program that I am essentially programming within myself—which isn't such an unthinkable concept, I guess. At best, one might argue for a pantheistic God, but then you run into that whole messy issue of free will. If God equals the universe, then free will becomes a bit of a paradox because, well, everything would just be "Him." But maybe, if we look at it differently... perhaps information is what actually arises first, rather than matter. Modern physics tends to view the origin of the universe as this incredibly rapid surge of massive amounts of high energy and matter during the Big Bang, right? So, as the universe expands, the sheer volume of quantum information—qu-information, I think they call it—increases at a much faster rate than the total amount of information required to manage the physical universe itself. This surplus of information is tucked away in that vast number of "virtual" particles constantly popping in and out of the vacuum. What I am trying to get at—and I might be overthinking this—is that the amount of information available to "God" isn't the same as the information available to the universe or even our own minds. He probably operates on a much higher level of logic than we ever could.

How does anything even come from nothing? I mean... I guess it’s just one of those questions that stays with you, isn't it? It feels almost impossible to wrap your head around. Maybe there isn't a clear answer, but I find myself wondering about it quite often. It's all so strange. 😕Mass is what drives gravity, right? But then you have to ask... why does mass even exist in the first place? I mean, it’s a bit of a rabbit hole. It seems to me that the law of conservation of energy ought to apply to gravity as well. If it doesn't, then we should probably be looking for some kind of evidence showing its effects outside of our own universe, or perhaps we're looking at a fundamental violation of that law itself. I guess the real question is... do we actually have any proof of that? Maybe. Or maybe not. I'm just thinking out loud, really.

The graviton itself lacks mass, much like the photon does. It simply acts as an attractor for anything that possesses mass. Honestly, nobody really understands where this "dark energy" in the universe comes from. I suppose it’s somewhat analogous to gravitational waves. In any case, it feels like this whole thing disrupts the traditional idea of energy conservation, because it implies that energy could potentially emerge from a "quantum vacuum." That leads me to think—and I might be wrong here—that perhaps the universe is actually a computer. Maybe information is what truly governs everything, rather than those rigid "laws of energy conservation," which would imply the universe is just some sort of simple mechanical toy. If information is the driving force behind the universe and the generation of energy, then the universe can't strictly be a closed system, since the accumulation of information could theoretically go on forever. Now, I don't necessarily mean that the increase in energy or the expansion of the universe must also be infinite; it might just mean that after a certain threshold, the universe becomes significantly more complex. But if we consider the possibility that the universe is a computer—more specifically, a Turing machine—then there might eventually be a moment where the program responsible for creating the universe simply stops running.

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/TuringMachine.html
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/HaltingProblem.html

Maybe... a "halting condition" for God could be that specific moment when created minds finally acquire enough knowledge about the universe to master it themselves. I suppose, in that sense, "God" would just abdicate, handing over the universe to these created minds to manage however they see fit. And then, once some other certain conditions are met, their own program terminates too, and everything just collapses into a "quantum vacuum."

No. I think the question of will should probably be on par with asking "Why does anything move at all?"
It seems more fundamental than a graviton as a particle, or even gravity as the curvature of spacetime.

To be fair, that can only serve as a comparison, I guess. So, the universe expands because something is emerging from nothingness.😕 I'll admit, I'm not exactly crazy about that idea either. But, if we follow that assumption of the universe acting like a computer, perhaps "will" is just the process of movement striving toward one very specific "halting condition." It implies there might be an ultimate goal that all particular wills are moving toward, though they have to obey the laws of a "Turing machine" along the way.

An example 3-state, 2-color Turing machine... It has a total of 3×2=6 rules, which describe the machine behavior for all possible states. In general, an n-state, k-color Turing machine requires k×n rules to specify its behavior.

There isn't any algorithm that could actually solve the "halting problem" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem , so I suppose the only real solution is to just let the program run and see what happens. So, maybe the purpose of will is simply to witness when the conditions for the program to stop are finally met (if they ever are). The program for will might look something like this:

While "condition is not halting condition" is true: continue looking for the halting condition
If condition is halting condition: stop

So, there is a possibility that the will to keep moving just... ceases. That it reaches a stopping point.

I mostly agree with you. But here’s my take: I don't equate "life" with intelligence. Intelligence is incredibly rare. If you look at history, most life out there is mindless—it doesn't show any traits we'd call intelligent. But every single one of those living things shares one thing: will. You don't have to be smart, rational, or conscious in the human sense to possess will. If we apply that logic to the universe, there's zero evidence that the universe itself is a conscious, intelligent entity. We're just following flawed logic by assuming that because humans are intelligent, we can't be anything more than a tiny part of the massive universe where we exist.
Look, I don't care about the universe, life, or even some potential God. What actually blows my mind is the human being. Based on every scientific or religious theory out there, we're basically just an unnecessary extra.
"Quote:"

Look, we aren't actually debating God here. We’re talking about raw information and that "autopoietic" programming we use to code our own existence—which isn't even an impossible concept. At best, you could argue for a pantheistic God, but then you hit the massive wall of free will. If God equals the universe, then free will is dead. Everything is just Him.

Look, don't take this personally, but here’s how I see your argument playing out:

Heraclitus said everything flows, and he was right—life and this entire world are constantly moving in some direction. Creation is a uniquely human trait. Aside from a few primitive instincts, animals don't create; they just adapt. Humans are the only ones who force the environment to bend to our will. If you take that logic a step further, you start to imagine that "someone" similar to us designed this whole setup. But let’s be real: a religious God feels way too anthropocentric. Trying to figure out His motives just leads straight into absurdity. From a scientific standpoint, God doesn't exist because He can't possibly fit into the hyper-specialized logical frameworks that modern science relies on. The absolute limit of our understanding is viewing the universe as either a massive computer or some deterministic clock that was wound up once and has been ticking ever since. In both scenarios, free will is a myth. It’s nothing more than an illusion.
Let’s start with a basic assumption: humans actually have free will. Even if we grant that, would we still need God? Would we still need to pretend the universe is some massive supercomputer or a multi-dimensional playground? I don't see how it works.
"Quote:"

Look, let's assume information comes first, not matter. Modern physics basically views the birth of the universe as this massive, instantaneous burst of high energy and matter during the Big Bang. As the universe expands, the sheer amount of quantum info—qu-information—skyrockets. It’s actually growing faster than the total amount of information needed to actually manage the physical universe. All that extra data is packed into a massive swarm of "virtual" particles constantly popping in and out of the vacuum. What I'm getting at is this: the amount of information available to God is way beyond what the universe or our own minds can handle. He operates on a higher level of logic than we ever could.

How can you even separate information from matter? If there's no matter, there's nothing—meaning zero information. It’s one thing to talk about an empty set mathematically, but it’s another thing entirely to have that empty set actually exist in reality. Information is a relationship. And if there’s no matter, there are no relationships.
I’ve never bought into this whole idea of "virtual particles" popping in and out of a vacuum. I'll admit, it's just a gut feeling because I don't have enough physics or philosophy training to break it down properly.
Logic is one thing. There isn't some "higher" logic. There's just levels of knowledge (information). In 99% of cases, we're using basically the same logic our ancestors used twenty thousand years ago. Einstein’s General Relativity isn't an example of a new logic; it's just a new perspective. The logic is old, but the results—the understanding—are mind-blowing.

A graviton itself has no mass, just like a photon. It simply pulls on things that *do* have mass. Nobody knows where the "dark energy" in the universe comes from. It’s similar to "gravitational waves." Either way, it seems to wreck the idea of energy conservation, since it implies energy can just emerge from the "quantum vacuum." That’s why it feels to me like the universe is a computer, governed by information rather than those "laws of energy conservation"—otherwise, it would just be some mechanical toy. If information drives the universe and the creation of energy, then the universe can't be a totally closed system, because the amount of information could theoretically go to infinity. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean energy increases or the expansion goes to infinity too, just that at some point, the universe becomes much more complex. But if the universe is actually a computer—specifically a Turing machine—then there might be a moment where the program for creating the universe just stops running.

You love playing with absolutes, just like I do.
That’s the deal: in General Relativity, spacetime (the background) is the absolute, while everything else is relative. You’re taking information as your absolute (and what even is information?), and based on its origin, you’re concluding the universe might be a computer. I take the human being as my absolute—not in some "Homo sapiens" or anthropocentric sense, but in terms of our sheer strangeness and how we don't belong in this world.
A Turing machine is just proof that you can't grasp the universe through logic and intelligence alone. So how do you do it? Maybe through poetry?

It’s possible that the "halting condition" for God is the moment created minds acquire enough knowledge about the universe to master it themselves. Basically, at one point, "God" abdicates and hands the universe over to created minds to run however they want. Then, once a few more conditions are met, their program also terminates, and everything collapses back into the "quantum vacuum."

But here we go again with the big question. Does everything need a reason to exist?

True, that’s just for comparison. So, the universe expands because something is coming from nothing.😕 I'll admit, I'm not crazy enough to buy that idea either. But based on that assumption of the universe as a computer, maybe "will" is a process moving toward fulfilling a specific "halting condition." This means there’s an ultimate goal all individual wills move toward, while still having to follow the rules of a "Turing machine."

Great.👍
But here we go again, back to Hegel’s unmoving mover. Where does the beginning actually start?

There isn't some magic algorithm to solve the "halting problem" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem . The only way out is to just run the program and see what happens. Basically, the goal of the will is to wait for the conditions that trigger the program to stop (if it ever does). Maybe the code for the will looks something like this:

While "condition is not halting condition" is true: continue looking for the halting condition
If condition is halting condition: stop

So yeah, there's a chance the will just runs out of steam and stops.

I find this fascinating. Cosmology is basically the crown jewel of science right now. Why is the universe accelerating its expansion again? What does it look like in, say, 100 billion years? Is the universe expanding because it has a will—meaning our own wills are just Platonic shadows of that universal drive—or is it just expanding randomly, pointlessly, and without any reason at all? I really hope it's not the latter. I believe there's a reason for things. Otherwise, everything becomes meaningless, including our own will and desire, no matter how massive they are.