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Politics : Should God be replaced? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Solon who wrote (1649)	10/12/2000 10:13:06 PM
From: cosmicforce	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 28931

It'll have to wait till Sunday. I'm taking my son on his first plane trip to see Grandma for the weekend. What fun! Only bad part is I have to give up the window seat. He is very excited about the trip. I always look out the window when I fly. Now I get to watch HIM look out the window. I think that'll be great.

To: Solon who wrote (1649)	10/12/2000 11:27:31 PM
From: cosmicforce	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 28931

OK. Food for thought. The level of determinism you wish to put in place, IMO, is not plausible. This goes back to an earlier assertion about the absolute nature of Logic being flawed by a "reality dilution" factor. I think that vary small secondary perturbations (like those occurring significantly upstream in time) possess the ability to shape future events. What I think now affects what you think next week but also crystallizes what I thought last week into its reality. Let me explain. Highly connected systems like these high-order, sequential state dependent systems I'm describing are chaotic and have manifestations of both random and bounded behavior simultaneously. To use a ridiculous example, your response to a specific stimulus, e.g., being kicked in the shins, depends specifically on your state of mind, how, when, where and with what force I produce such kick. But it also is dependent upon many other factors as well. While it would seem there are bounds to this behavior (like the unlikely case where such an action by me would provoke in you a desire to sing "Stars and Stripes, Forever"), my mere suggestion of such an state's existence (like singing the S&S,F song) CHANGES the probability of you coming up with this response. Now that I've thought it and written it, it is now not entirely out of bounds that you might very well do that, even if only to produce a laugh in me at the very absurdity of it. In a way the game has already been played with nary a kick. I play these games in my head all the time. What if Lincoln caught a cold the night before the play at the Ford Theater, and only his wife went. The very fact that there was an assassination in the 1860's has caused me to write about its existence, reinforcing the event in the past. But if I pretended it didn't happen, and so did everyone else, we can make it not happen in the past by erasing its causal influence on the presence. This is based upon my equivalence hypothesis for reality. I suspect it is bidirectional; the existence of a state now cements a state in the past, further jelling future realities out of past realities. Our current beliefs about the past reinforce the existence of those past states even if only in an imaginary plane. By accepting the new states that would have been generated by that precursor state being different, we change it's current likelihood and it's past likelihood! This is a relatively new belief for me. One of the reasons I hate revisionism is that it messes with reality. My reality gets messed with when people start acting like some other reality was or is true. This causes conflicting reality in the here and now (a kind of cognitive dissonance). I think, in a way, Jews and Arabs are both right about their history and the conflict we see partly arises from the fact that here are two peoples who hold entirely different views of reality yet both swear they are right. How do you fix that? You have to get them to buy into a NEW reality that grows from the current moment into the future. They have to first agree on how things are now and that, in turn, produces an agreement about what happened in the past. The problem is that those past states never completely get extinguished, they just get diluted. Too strange? Dunno.

To: Solon who wrote (1649)	10/13/2000 7:33:43 AM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 28931

I agree with you if you are saying that the world is deterministic- aside from the uncertainty principle, and the possibility that the future may interact with the past- but even that may fit within a deterministic model. But I would guess it's impossible to know. So it's as if we had free will even if we don't. So to US, except for philosophical purposes, it doesn't matter.