TPF : The Mold Theory of Person God

[Gnomon]

The Mold Theory of Person Gods
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussi ... on-gods/p1

↪Art48
Indeed and the speculative constructions and reinventions can go on forever. But why? — Tom Storm

Finally, at least that's a philosophical question, not a physical "how" question. So, it's appropriate for The Philosophical Forum. It's so important to humans that sages have been trying to answer it for thousands of years. But, it's even more difficult than a moon-shot, because we know exactly where that shining orb is located. So maybe, Art is trying to suggest a new way (a logical extension ladder?) to get closer to that ancient quest. Remember, "they said it couldn't be done". But then, someone said we'll do it, "not because it is easy, but because it's hard".

Perhaps we tackle the hard questions, because we like challenges. Maybe it's because you and I exist, and we have no better explanation for temporal contingent existence, than something self-existent, hence not subject to space-time attacks. If the god-question does not interest you, perhaps an empirical science forum would suit you better. Philosophy is about immaterial Ideas, not material objects. It's reasonable to be skeptical of unsupported ideas, but the only support for philosophy is logical reasoning (i.e. other ideas).

Is philosophy a pointless pastime? Or is human Reason a way of seeing without eyes, and Knowing without direct experience? Are the posters on this forum just talking cartoon animals? Or, is there a good reason for speculating beyond the limits of the senses? Are we on this forum just pounding words, for no better reason than a quick snack?

I know you know better than that. And you have seen plenty of tired Old arguments before. But Art's argument is philosophical, not empirical, rational, not religious. It's not necessarily true, but maybe, he has some good points, that are not easily defeated by tired old "show me the money" retorts. Logical relationships can only be deconstructed by better logical arguments. Admissions of exasperation don't count. Just sayin.

https://www.sciencenews.org/wp-content/ ... /15870.jpg

[Gnomon]

Are the posters on this forum just talking cartoon animals? Or, is there a good reason for speculating beyond the limits of the senses? Are we on this forum just pounding words, for no better reason than a quick snack? — Gnomon
I think we are just pounding words, and testing ideas we are cartoon animals and searchers for truth. — Tom Storm

OK. Fair enough. Though dismissive of word-pounding Philosophers. But, when philosophical searchers go looking for truth, is there any good reason to explore beyond the limits of human senses, and their mechanical extensions? That's what Art seems to be doing with his "mold theory of personal gods". I'd never heard of that particular argument, but it seems reasonable enough. Not necessarily true, but worth thinking about.

Ancient humans knew nothing about modern Science, so they depended on Intuition for answers to questions that were not obvious. The only causal actors they were familiar with, were intentional animals & humans. So, they could be forgiven for assigning personal intention to the invisible forces of Nature. We now call it "Energy", but the ancients called it "Spirit", using an analogy with invisible breath, that can leave the body at death, with no measurable physical changes.

We now know more about internal physical changes at the precipice of death, but none of them individually accounts for the undeniable difference between a living willful human and an inanimate inert physical body. So, what is that difference? Is it some physical Quanta, as Reductionists tend to assume? Or some non-physical Qualia, as Holists postulate? If the latter, then the notion of an "invisible bodiless spirit" animating & directing Nature might make sense.

In my own postulate-pounding, I propose Enformed Energy (Enformy : energy + information) as a meaningful description of how the random directionless accidents of Evolution, chosen & collated by Natural Selection, eventually produced intentional creatures who wonder about their own origins. That's how Evolutionary Programming works to design things that are difficult to define in advance. And that may also be the kind of abstract/mathematical/logical Creator (empty enforming mold) that Art is proposing. So, let's hear him out.


In terms of application, Evolutionary Programming is most commonly used in constrained environments such as scheduling and routing, power systems, and designing systems
https://towardsdatascience.com/unit-5-e ... ed3a00166a
As a designer myself, I am acutely aware that design is an open-ended art. Hence difficult to define, except by describing a desired end-state (teleology). Computers are much better than humans for pounding-away at seemingly pointless mathematical computations of value & probability.

We mold clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that makes the vessel useful. We fashion wood for a house, but it is the emptiness inside that makes it livable. We work with the substantial, but the emptiness is what we use.
___Tao Te Ching

[Gnomon]

This has so many practical verification as many practical denials. Empty statement, lacking wisdom. But it is with wisdom that the followers fill it with, and therefore the followers of Ching work with the substantial, but it is the voidful emptiness of this aphorism that they use. — god must be atheist

I'm not aware of any practical empirical way to verify the usefulness of emptiness, except to put stuff in it. Then it's simply a rational conclusion from experience, that empty space is a place to put things. This is the basis of the old glass "half-empty" vs "half full". That's not a true/false statement, but a matter of opinion, depending on how you see the future : pessimistic vs optimistic.

When realtors advertise a house for sale, do they promote the physical studs & bricks, or the beauty of its organization & the utility of its spaces? Because there's nothing there, and some people can't imagine filled emptiness, many sellers use rental furniture to assist their imagination, to "fill it with wisdom". Homebuyers pay good money for such insubstantial non-things as Beauty & Utility. Perhaps because their future usefulness is only apparent to those who can "see" what's not there. Due to "quantum weirdness", even pragmatic Scientists have been forced to redefine common-sense "empty space" as "potential energy".

In psychology, it's called "figure ground perception". And in architecture, the empty space between buildings is known as "negative space". That's because some short-sighted people are biased to view emptiness as nothingness, instead of potential usable space. Faithful Materialists have a practical prejudice against nothingness, because it is commonly equated with spirits & ghosts. But Neuroscientist Terrance Deacon has developed a detailed theory, that is just as reasonable as Darwin's Evolution of living organisms from non-living substance. But it fills the gap between Matter & Life, with a modern computer analogy for the power of Potential to create something new & meaningful from something that is not-yet-real. Don't judge without knowledge. Read it for yourself.

The Power of Absence :
There is a glaring gap in modern science, and Terrence Deacon aims to close it – in part by explaining how material things can have “aims”, and how “absence” can serve to fill functional gaps. He is a neuro-scientist whose expertise straddles the borders between Classical & Quantum, Physics & Metaphysics, and between Science & Philosophy. Deacon says, “we need a theory of everything that does not leave it absurd that we exist”. Ironically, his central thesis sounds absurd on the face of it : that non-existence can affect existing things. Although “absence” may be irrelevant to “inanimate things, it is a defining property of life and mind.” So, he hopes to open a dialogue “between our currently incompatible cultures of knowledge, the physical and the meaningful”. He laments that “scientific knowledge is viewed with distrust by many, as an enemy of human values, the handmaid of cynical secularism, and a harbinger of nihilism”. He aims to regain that trust by showing that Science is relevant to heart-felt human interests.

Although Deacon's theory challenges the philosophy of Materialism, he takes great pains to avoid the slippery slope into Spiritualism as an explanation for meta-physical phenomena. Instead, he offers a naturalistic account for Life, Mind, Soul, Sentience, Consciousness, and most other immaterial features of the world. My own thesis of Enformationism also attempts to bridge the conceptual chasm between Physics and Meta-physics. But the main difference, is that I didn't automatically reject the possibility of a supernatural agent to serve as the First Cause of everything. Instead, I proposed something like a LOGOS, who created the plenipotent Information system that enforms the world via teleological power : a plan for the development of a cosmos. Of course, the deistic inferences I'm drawing from his evidence are precisely the ones he's trying to avoid. And I view his “Absence” as a religiously neutral term for causation that used to be known as incorporeal “Spirit”, but is now known as incorporeal "Energy".
http://bothandblog4.enformationism.info/page17.html

Universal Negation :
All roads are blocked to a philosophy which reduces everything to the word ‘no.’ To ‘no’ there is only one answer and that is ‘yes.’ Nihilism has no substance. There is no such thing as nothingness, and zero does not exist. Everything is something. Nothing is nothing.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nothingness/

FIGURE - GROUND vs NOTHING - SOMETHING vs REAL - POTENTIAL
toptal-blog-image-1522045559221-12e437d49472555fcc386865fbabd074.jpg

[Gnomon]

The OP is my attempt to understand a phenomena I've witnessed many times. It contains the example of King David's census, but multiple similar examples could be given. The OP presents a thesis, a possible explanation, but doesn't not present a proof. — Art48

I like the metaphor of a god-mold, filled with locally-available god-stuff. Which historically, has been mostly based on personal experience with physical human people in political positions of near-absolute power. And, it seems to be a novel take on the old "god shaped hole in the heart" argument.

The OP begins with some examples of questionable behavior by "person gods". Presumably, the intent is to suggest a viable alternative : a non-person god. But that concept may not make sense to most on this forum, especially those with an unimaginative Materialistic worldview. So, they react as-if you are proposing just-another-anthro-morphic-god. Perhaps, you could get it back on track by presenting your thesis without reference to the Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions, and without reference to individual personal experiences. Though, that may be too abstract, and too non-sciencey, for those same Realist/Materialists. Law courts are often tied-up for days with "what did you know (i.e. experience) and when did you know (experience) it?"

Maybe you could shift the focus to the art of transfer molding. That would avoid getting personality traits & behaviors confused with the notion of god models. With no physical human example to create the mold from, any resemblance to a "mere" human would be lost. And the artist would have to create his mold-model from scratch.

AN ARTISTIC IMPRESSION OF ARIES, DAVID ???
moldingcasting_eu_02_640.jpg

[Gnomon]

Daoism . . . . Does the God piece fit with reality as we know it. The problem is that the God that we want is incompatible with reality and the God that is compatible is one we don't want. Wicked! — Agent Smith

Good point! That's the problem with presenting a philosophical god-model that "fits with reality". Most people don't like Reality -- it hurts -- so they want their G*D to be ideal, like a knight in shining armor. Taoism was intended to be more realistic than that. Lao Tse did not describe the TAO as a conventional prayer-granting ancestor deity, and the word for "God" only appears once in the Tao De Ching. Nevertheless, the popular religions that sprang from the Tao root did include a variety of deities to be worshiped and prayed to.

So, I interpret the Tao, as more like Spinoza's impersonal-god-of-the philosophers (i.e. deus sive natura) The point you noted is that that the typical worshiper doesn't want an abstract nature-god, they want a god with the super-natural power to adapt capricious reality to their personal needs & wishes. Instead, Lao Tse faced the facts, and advised that we adapt ourselves to the reality of Nature. Such a nature-god is "compatible with reality" and with empirical Science; but not with human desires for a more perfect world. The "real world" is as good as it gets*1. And the natural "Way" follows the "path" of least resistance*2. Which is also a basic principle of Physics.*3 *4

Even theistic religions have been forced by centuries of poor response to prayers, to postpone perfection to a New World and a second Life. Consequently, parallel to their idealized & romantic god-models, most religions also offer pragmatic advice similar to that of Lao Tse's golden rule : " “If only the ruler and his people would refrain from harming each other, all the benefits of life would accumulate in the kingdom.”— Tao Te Ching.


*1. best of all possible worlds, in the philosophy of the early modern philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), the thesis that the existing world is the best world that God could have created.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/best-o ... ble-worlds
Note -- a perfect world would be purely deterministic ( a heaven), but a world with rational free-will physical creatures must be less than perfect, in order to allow options. So Leibniz' "best" compromise solution to the Freewill within Determinism paradox was to make a good, but imperfect world. For example, the metaphorical Garden of Eden was perfect, but the humans were mere instinctive animals, with no way to reason between Good & Evil. After expulsion into the Real World, they had to learn to adapt to a less-than-perfect environment. If they felt cold, they learned to killed cold-adapted furry animals, and to wear their skins as clothing. Their food no longer hung low on trees, so they learned to eat the flesh of those cute furry animals.

*2. The path of least resistance is the physical or metaphorical pathway that provides the least resistance to forward motion by a given object or entity, among a set of alternative paths.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_of_least_resistance

*3. Principle of Least Action :
"“That is what we are going to use to calculate the true path. "
https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_19.html
Note -- "Tao" = path of least resistance

*4. The Principle of Least Action says that, in some sense, the true motion is the optimum out of all possible motions, The idea that the workings of nature are somehow optimal, suggests that nature is working in an efficient way, with minimal effort, to some kind of plan.
https://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/nsm10/PrincLeaAc.pdf
Note -- "Tao" = Stoic acceptance of imperfections