Why is There Anything at All?

[_Darth J]

Every time I read one of Droopy's posts, it makes me wonder if he takes himself to dinner and a movie before he masturbates, and if he sends flowers to himself the next day.

[_Sethbag]

Every time I read one of Droopy's posts, it makes me wonder if he takes himself to dinner and a movie before he masturbates, and if he sends flowers to himself the next day.

Or maybe he can't even remember his name the next morning.

[_ludwigm]

In what sense are the levels vertical?

They are hierarchal in nature, each one above being, in all things, of greater "glory" than those below and allowing a far greater range and capacity for personal growth.

So you think the universe is arranged by "glory"--a highly anthropomorphic notion? It sounds to me like Mormon jargon is causing fuzzy thinking.

Aside from the not too polite wording, this is the case.
It is worth to be a sig line - but I am happy with my one from the first minute on.

Did I say these "degrees of glory" are out in intergalactic space somewhere, free-floating outside of or beyond environmental contexts allowing mental orientation in space, time, and dimension?

No you didn't. But you did not explain what the alternative is or what the proper sense of order is except to appeal to a very dubious notion of 'glory".
You might as well say "grooviness".

Or "bu-ba-baff".
Umberto Eco wrote in On Literature, "I made a list of titles, among which I liked best Blitiri ('blitiri,' like 'babazuf,' is a term used by the late Scholastics to indicate a word devoid of meaning)"

As one moves from level to level, how does one know that one has move to a higher as opposed to lower level?

Stars, moon, sun...

What? There is no reasonable cosmic sense in which the moon is higher than the earth. What in the world are you talking about.

Celestial, terrestrial, telestial ( ). Mormon jargon again.
see http://mormondiscussions.com/phpBB3/vie ... 06#p708706


You know (do You?), "There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars: for one star differeth from another star in glory." (1 Corinthians 15:41)
This is a mistranslation - of many mistranslations of KJV.
Sun, moon and stars have light, brigthness, luminance, brilliance. Not glory (kudos, renown, praise, splendor, resplendence).
Then Joseph Smith - with this mighty intellect - misunderstand this mistranslating.

The Latin Bible uses the word "claritas", the German one "Klarheit". You can check their English translation.
The Greek "δοξα" has led astray the translators of KJV...

[_lulu]

This still doesn't answer my question about how the first flash of the big bang was lit....

Give us your best argument that connects your posited fuse lighter with the First Vision.

Harmony?

[_Bazooka]

.

So the question is, if it's OK for gods always to have existed, then why is it not OK for the universe always to have existed?

The "stuff" of which the universe was organized has always existed, as has matter, in some form, at some level, in some mode of manifestation or expression.

What the gospel posits is that the universe could not exist at all as an ordered, coherent, complex, dynamic phenomenon without God's creative activity. The waters of creation, the chaos from whence the organized, complex, hierarchal, symmetrical, finely tuned and calibrated universe arose always existed, and always will.

4. The Temple Account. Using the power of drama and group participation, this account teaches, so far as possible within the limits of dramatic structure, the various steps involved in the Creation, the sequence of events, and the roles of those involved.

http://www.lds.org/ensign/1986/01/four- ... n?lang=eng

This is the sequence of events as taught within the LDS Endowment:
1. Earth organised
2. Water and Land separated
3. Light and dark separated
4. Plant life created
5. Animal life created
6. Man created

According to published chronology the "man created" bit took place circa 4,000 BC.
According to published chronology God decided to destroy all that had been created by covering the whole earth with water circa 2,300 BC.

[_Droopy]

Droopy, I guess you do not understand how imprecise you are being. The word "level" does not necessarily have anything to do with spatial regions.

In the way I'm conceptualizing it, it does.

Also, the fact that there are some things you wish to call levels does not clarify what type of relationships exist in terms of greater or less, above or below.

Its not me intention to do so, only to specify that they exist and that there are various levels or degrees of such "realities" containing a vast variety of phenomena with properties compatible with that level of reality.

And what is it that is multidimensional? The set of levels or the levels themselves.

At the very least, all that exists within each of the levels themselves.

I should also point out that we are already living in a multidimensional world, a three dimensional world is multidimensional. The word seems to be in your post merely to add a sense of awe.

Lost, Tarski? Who would have thought...

The electromagnetic spectrum does not have discrete regions. It is one continuum.

It is a continuum containing regions, regions that, once well within them, become clearly demarcated from the other regions by their inherent properties.

The fact that we only preceive a range of frequencies with our eyes is not an intrinsic fact about the spectrum,

Those different regions represent electromagnetic radiation of differing frequencies, it is not just a matter of our eyes not being able to perceive into those ranges. Its all "light" (just as Joseph said it was all "matter") but its properties are modified at different wavelengths, frequencies, or amplitudes.

The region of visible light does not allow perception in the ultraviolet or infrared range. Special instrumentalities are required to do so.

No kidding. But that does not make the visible range adiscrete region of the spectrum.

The nature of the information transmitted or perceivable within those ranges (one can "see into" the infrared or ultraviolet spectrum, or microwave or x-ray range) is, I think, different and unique enough, within each region, to be understood as "distinct" areas of electromagnetic radiation having distinct properties at that frequency or wavelength, even though all of it is essentially the same underlying phenomenon.

So you think the universe is arranged by "glory"--a highly anthropomorphic notion? It sounds to me like Mormon jargon is causing fuzzy thinking.

You have no way, means, methadology, or intellectual tools whatsoever, in a strictly human sense, to come to any conclusion one way or the other whether it is or isn't.

I am now thinking of a real notion of level in nature: the levels of subatomic organization. Is the nucleon level more glorious than the quark level? Is the tensor product of several unitary representations of SU(3) more glorious than SU(3) itself? Is molecule more glorious than an atom? Is the sky more glorious than the ground?

The things that are "acted upon" must have their own various hierarchal levels, degrees, or planes of phenomenal manifestation as well as consciousness, mind, will, and character. This would at least follow from LDS doctrine as given thus far, it would seem.

What? There is no reasonable cosmic sense in which the moon is higher than the earth. What in the world are you talking about.

Read the scriptures.

The rest of your post shows me that you are unaware of phenomenology in the sense of this http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology/

Phenomenology is the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view.

Where did I say that I've been doing phenomenology in this sense? I've spoken at length of phenomena, phenomenal manifestation, phenomenal reality etc. (all my own terms) but not of phenomenology, which, as I've studied it thus far (Hegel, primarily, but a bit of Sartre as well) has little relevance to the gospel except at it impinges upon the structure(s) of consciousness at the level of individual perception. That, however, has not been what this post was about.

The degrees of glory are, in LDS theology, as real, material, empirical, and substantial as anything in this (telestial/"fallen") particular region of phenomenal manifestation; they are real external to and independent of our own subjective perceptions/beliefs regarding them, just as the electromagnetic spectrum exists and has the properties it has independent of our belief in it or any constructed system of phenomenology relative to it.

Or, if you are then you are conflating that sense of phenomenon with the sense which is simply "something that occurs".

I'm doing neither. The OP asked the question, "Why is there anything at all," not "what do I perceive about the universe from within x philosophical system." I was not attempting to do phenomenology, in the traditional Western philosophical sense, but to ask a philosophical question about the ultimate properties of reality at the foundation of all phenomena (and reality as such counts here as a phenomena itself, although at the level of pure axiom).

Unfortunately you incude things that are unobservable and almost certainly nonexistent such as telestial/terrestrial/celestial degrees of glory.

And you know this precisely how?

[_Droopy]

Every time I read one of Droopy's posts, it makes me wonder if he takes himself to dinner and a movie before he masturbates, and if he sends flowers to himself the next day.

Every time I read one of Darth's posts, I must seriously come to terms with the possibility that there are some people out in the world, unnerving and disorienting as it may be, who never stop masturbating.

[_Tarski]

Lost, Tarski? Who would have thought...

I was pointing out that you have very little understanding of the meaning of "multidimensional" and are therefore likely using it only for effect in the same way that new age con men do. How is that evidence of my being lost?

You know nothing of how to think about dimension and are seriously in the dark about the various precise and subtle senses that word takes on when one is engaged in a real study of real phenomena.

I think that almost anyone can go back and read through this thread and see that you are seriously ill-equipped to discuss any of the truly deep and beautiful features of the universe and are equally in poor position to engage in anything to do with ontology or even speculative metaphysics (you are engaging in feeble Mormon speculative metaphysics a la Skousen).
I think it is now clear that you are basically steeped in primary level Mormon talking points about the plan of salvation and have picked up on a little bit of the speculative Mormon metaphysics of guys like Cleon Skousen somehow. The latter is truly antiscientific conceptually simple minded dribble of the worst kind.

Real science and real philosophy seeks to provide either empirical publically verifiable facts about our word or some kind of logical, preferably mathematical proof of consistency and consequences of the involved ideas. Definitions need to be presice in a way you seem light years from understanding.

You brought up "light". The real nature of light cannot be understood without understanding Lie groups, Lie algebras, gauge symmetry, canonical field quantization and host of other things that actually are deep. You would learn about 4-vectors and 4-tensors and find out some really neat things about the subtle difference between temporal dimensions and spatial dimensions and the profound way that they are unified with the empirically vetted notion of a spacetime metric with indefinite signature, the invariant light cone, twistors, unitary representations of semisimple Lie algebras, and much more.
Most of all you would (but will not ever) know that all of these things are far more than fancy sounding words. Just the opposite.

When I was a young lad, I was drawn to all deep sounding things I heard in the halls at church out of the mouths of haughty men who had spent a few weeks at some BYU know your religion camp who spoke about the light of Christ filling the cosmos, and things acted on and things that act. I was fasinated by degrees of glory and being infused with "pure intelligence" by the holy spirit. I thought a lot about things in the scriptures, and the things being said by Skousen, McConkie and Joseph Fielding Smith.

But then later I had a taste of real insight and real understanding of the sort that can be laid out and delt with objectively either by mathematical argument or empirical controlled testing. The new world not only made sense and so forth but the big surprise was the numinous depth. It turned out to be truly deep and intellectually, even spiritually moving in ways I had never experienced before.
I looked back and considered those cliché deepities that had facinated me before (Kolob and 1000 years to God and visions and other twinkly feeling about rooms with white furnature, power of faith to make worlds, and so on). It was both boring and so fuzzyminded as to be essentially free of content. Much of it didn't rise to the level of being wrong (since it never pinned itself down with clarity to the point of being wrong or right--nonsense in other words).

In short, you are really missing out by being stuck with the inferior speculations, ponfifications and fuzzy thoughts of chaps like Cleon Skousen and by being satisfied with deep sounding Mormon jargon that so facinates precocious members of Mormondom's deacons quorums everywhere and is spread by know-it-all pot bellied scoutmaster's around campfires somewhere while gazing like a stoner at the stars while enchanting young minds with the fairy tales and amphigories of Parley P. Pratt and his ilk (Those little stargazers would be better off being enchanted by reasonable dreamers like Sagan, Asimov, or even Feynmann.)
I am quite happy that you think my thoughts aren't deep. It would be a poor commentary on me if you did.

You have exposed yourself quite a bit in your responses and nonresponses in this thread. I hope as many people as possible read it. Your thinking about science, cosmology and especially metaphysical matters is impoverished and I would say the very same thing if your were an exmo that agreed with me on other matters such as politics (since I am about honesty and not just about "the home team").
It could be otherwise if you weren't so proud and filled to the brim with pseudoknowledge and bent on wasting precious time grooming yourself to be the next Mark Levin or Glenn Beck. There are people willing to explain very deep and beautiful things the likes of which you haven't imagined, but you greet such with insults. You have received some insults in return here in this post but rather retrained ones, really, considering the magnitude of the problem.

For others I recommend Roger Penrose's "Road to Reality"--a slow start but it climbs to dizzying heights.

[_son of Ishmael]

Every time I read one of Droopy's posts, it makes me wonder if he takes himself to dinner and a movie before he masturbates, and if he sends flowers to himself the next day.

Every time I read one of Darth's posts, I must seriously come to terms with the possibility that there are some people out in the world, unnerving and disorienting as it may be, who never stop masturbating.

"...who never stop masturbating"

And that's a bad thing???

[_Bazooka]

Every time I read one of Droopy's posts, it makes me wonder if he takes himself to dinner and a movie before he masturbates, and if he sends flowers to himself the next day.

Every time I read one of Darth's posts, I must seriously come to terms with the possibility that there are some people out in the world, unnerving and disorienting as it may be, who never stop masturbating.

Droopy, do you believe that solo masturbating will often lead to group masturbating and homosexuality?