My question is: does Schamesh exist? — frank
It requires deductive reasoning from available (conditional) evidence to logical conclusions. — Gnomon
This is the first time someone called me wise. I am being myself in the world.
You're babbling at bit here. — Punshhh
But seriously, are you really yourself in the world? Or are you simply a culturally conditioned persona, believing a collection of pieces of information given you by imperfect people in your environment? — Punshhh
True. But Kindness, Generosity, and Conservation of Nature are good. Unlike animals, humans are moral agents. They have a choice to do good or bad. But most are pretty good or not so bad. Only a few are excessively extreme in their saintliness or demonism. That's why, in an imperfect world that seems to be gradually getting better (morally), we need to appreciate the moderate. It's OK to be just OK.My fundamental premise is that human cruelty, greed and exploitation of nature are "bad." — uncanni
"I was born this way" ___Lady GagaWhatever I am: conditioned by culture, beleiving in pieces of information that imperfect people gave me: I am still me. I am I, and I am not not I.
I can't not be me, however was I produced to be who I am. — god must be atheist
That's why we have philosophy. Not to decide what's true, but what's reasonable. :smile:What if my unproven and assumed-to-be-true premise is incongruent with yours? — god must be atheist
Humans' endless task is tikkun olam--repair of the world. — uncanni
if there is a God, you might be more than you think — Punshhh
if there is a God, you might be more than you think — Punshhh
Well, truth is more of a stranger in this story than fiction, so Nobody was well on his way to the early days of oblivion…
“How’s it going,” asked Rascal of Nobody.
“It’s raining,” answered Nobody.
“Hardly?” inquired Puff, the better side of the plurality of he and himself.
“It’s hardly raining hardly,” answered Nobody.
“What does that mean exactly?” asked Rascal, along with many others.
“Never mind,” said Nobody. “I have an umbrella!”
Austin piped in that the English language was becoming slightly affected, via the interruptions in past, but encouraged that the journey go on, and so it continued as it progressed and went on.
“By the way, what’s the antecedent of ‘it’ in “It’s raining?” posted WiseGuy, thinking he had posed quite a tough question.
“Nothing,” said Nobody, “in the form of reverse gravity and forward light, the ultimate antecedent, of our time dilation called reality. I’m getting damp.”
Rascal added that “A little rain never hurt Nobody,” a new and original saying that suddenly appeared in the book of the 2501 greatest sayings ever.
“I hope the rain keeps up,” said Nobody.
“Why?” inquired Profpat.
“So then it won’t come down!”
“How’s it going, Nobody?” asked Rascal again, figuring that Nobody’s watch was fast from relativity and that some hours had passed.
Nobody replied, “I heard that the universe was a free lunch, so I’m having it in a restaurant on an asteroid.”
“How is it?”
“The food is great, but there’s no atmosphere.”
Now, there’s always someone who interrupts threads with off the wall stuff, so ChickenMan tried to catch Rascal unawares with “Why did the chicken fly across the road?” and “Did the egg cross into God’s universe before the chicken?”
Rascal, taking all this in stride during a lull, replied, “As allowed by Einstein’s relativity, the road moved to the other side of the chicken, then, the chicken didn’t land so much as the road rose to meet the chicken, as it extended in 4D, much like the baseball field rises to meet the pop up, since All is expanding. Furthermore, chickens can’t fly! Also, the chicken came first, for I can’t really picture ‘God’ sitting on an egg to hatch it. Now, we’re trying to better tune in the universal DNA here, so no more chicken shit posts please!”
“Hold it,” warned Graybeard. “Some critical atoms must have been disturbed by Nobody’s journey. Now the “Ace”, a new name for the formerly bottommost playing card, the lowly “one”, is now higher than the King in many kinds of card games; this is a sacrilege and a travesty! Wait until London hears about this.”
Mkirkpatrick somehow got into the conference call and said, “Just heard, but relax. The All is the One; the “A” on the card really stands for “All”, for this is what gave rise to the monarchy. And of course the one is the One.”
“It’s okay,” Fredrick said calmly, being an expert on numbers and on playing them, “the play and strategy of all affected card games has not been altered in any way. Keep on going, Nobody.”
While some old times passed, Graybeard stood around looking at the man in the moon and watching the grass grow. Fredrick checked his watch to see if he was wearing it and then counted to five on his left hand. Fine. On the other hand, he still had five fingers, so, all was still going well in the good old days. Profpat sharpened his pencil until it got down to the eraser.
Rascal interjected, “Some sort of high stakes poker mania called “Texas Hold ‘em” has broken out in some countries. Googling now. It’s even replacing baseball on many TV channels!”
“It’s okay,” reassured Fredrick, “No harm done. We’ll pass it off as another fad.”
Nobody was heading billions of years into the past, having left the asteroid before he got a polaroid from sitting on it too long, and was passing many frolicking Dodo birds, along with the beginnings of such ancient notions as alchemy and astrology. (Hey, why are hemorrhoids not called asteroids?)
A rickety old rope bridge of rotting planks finally led Nobody past many antiquities such as one-cent stamps and on to the control panel of the ancient broadcasting station of CBS—the Cosmic Broadcast Station.
“Be careful,” advised Profpat. “Be so very delicate with any adjustments. Remember, on Earth, how the tiniest minute adjustment of a shower knob of even a millionth of an inch causes the shower water to become totally steaming hot! No plumber in the universe has ever been able to resolve this problem. It has something to do with quarks, quicks, and quacks.”
“Don’t worry,” answered Nobody. “I’ll be gentle; I’ll just breathe on it slightly. We want clarity in the universe’s DNA and ours, as in improving the reception of a TV set, not unproving it back into the stone age of three channels, all of them baseball games, and the weather, with snow and static on the others. I’ll do my best, come hell or hot water.”
Nobody sprayed a few atoms toward the antenna and waited. His data/video link soon improved but then overloaded from the high transfer speed and burned out. Nobody’s cell phone soon rang, but it was only a solicitor trying to sell him some time-share condos; however, Graybeard finally got through and said “Great, the stars are becoming clearer and I can even see some galaxies with the naked eye, but take it slow; we don’t want to upset the balance of nature by making it too bright at night. It’s good to tighten a screw, but if we tighten it too much and we’re screwed.
“Wait, hold it! I can see Venus, the goddess of love and passion all too well. Yikes, I didn’t know she was that old! Plus, I now have x-ray vision and can see into all the apartments, but the worst thing is that I can hear everything they are saying. Some things should be obscene and not heard! Also, I’m getting something called ‘cartoons’ on my TV set, and they’re really weird, very unreal looking and everyone in them is doing silly things.”
Nobody took out a hand held ‘vacuum’ cleaner and brought a few atoms back in as a fine adjustment.
“Good,” cheered Graybeard, “that’s a good balance. Try something a little higher up and let’s see what happens. I am reading some fluctuations out of kilter around there.”
Notions of up and down were useless in space, so Nobody picked a direction at random.
“No,” said Graybeard. “Not that way; use your other ‘up’.”
“Okay, I’m switching. Back in kilter?”
Graybeard answered, “I don’t know; I’m seeing another goddess.”
Suddenly, the Chicago Cubs, which had finally made it to the World Series of baseball, were swept in four straight games, while the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, and other unbelievables in attendance looked on in horror.
Then Michael Jordan gave up basketball for baseball and then switched back to basketball again. Global warming picked up and then an ice age began. Jesus, born a Christian, became Jewish, then converted back again. Hell froze over and then thawed out. The same with the River of Forgetfulness; everyone was walking on water for a while and running like Hell from Hades.
Profpat warned “Watch that shower knob, Nobody; the River Styx just boiled away and a bunch of dead people drowned after many more escaped!”
“Where are they going?” inquired Nobody.
Profpat replied, “They don’t know; they say they have CRS disease.”
“What’s CRS stand for?”
“Can’t Remember Shit.”
“OK guys. A little upper, Nobody” requested Graybeard. “That other direction was a downer.”
Nobody reached up and out, but the bridge creaked and groaned, causing Nobody to slip a bit as a rope frayed, and all the TOE researchers feared that his adjustment time was now quite limited.
Meanwhile, Barry Bonds had broken the home run record, but, of course, steroids would be blamed for it. Mount Rushmore had briefly turned into Presidents Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan, but just as soon returned back. However, the Boston Red Sox still won a World Series for the first time in 100 years.
Also, it turned out that someone named Yogi Berra had said many sayings that seemed to make sense, but really didn’t, like “That restaurant is so crowded that no one goes there anymore”, “It gets dark early out here”, “If people don’t want to come out to the ball park, nobody’s going to stop them”, “It’s deja vu all over again”, “I didn’t really say all of the things I said”, and many more unsayings.
Silly signs appeared on highways, like “Road Works” (it doesn’t work well during construction), and “Speed Zone” (meaning slow down). Something called rap music had become ever-present, as well as a new word, “oxymoron”, which was probably a related event. A funny thing happened to President Clinton, but he wasn’t impeached for it. He neither inhales nor does he have sex.
“This one may be hard to explain,” lamented Fredrick, “but we’ll chalk it up to human nature.”
Nobody did some fiddling of some knobs that he wasn’t supposed to touch, twiddling “More of This-ness”, and, as a result some people on Krypton started to make every shot in basketball games, even from 50 miles away, being really IN THE ZONE, plus doing many other superhuman things. All the TOE viewers from Earth were cheering this, but Fredrick warned them that total perfection might take all the fun out of life.
“Better hold off,” Graybeard suggested.
Nobody dialed the knobs back a little.
RascalPuff interjected, “Some people are now reporting that they can fly like superman in some new event called ‘sleeping hallucinations’ or ‘night dreams’.”
Also, zeroes began to look like the alphabetic letter ‘oh’, causing much confusion, along with ‘one’ looking like ‘el’, and some words began to have the same sound, as called a ‘homonym’ but not a ‘homonim’, and some with similar meanings; as called a ‘synonym’, although it had none itself, and some words now had multiple meanings. And how come ‘monosyllabic’ wasn’t? Nor was ‘phonetic’ spelled the way it sounded. And why was ‘abbreviation’ such a long word without any? Also, ‘love’ was reduced to having only the two good rhymes of ‘dove’ and ‘above’, which soon became overused and stale, frustrating many poets and their readers.
Austin reported that a part of Hawaii had sprung up in Wildwood, NJ, named ‘Sunset Bay’ and that it had had big fat singers, torches, palm trees, waterfalls, tropical flowers, a half-ship at the end of a pier that served as a bar, good food (ordering raw oysters well done), although it consisted of only waves and fields (lucky that his brain turned the noumena into phenomena), and sand all around as a floor. Also, he said that many more ‘o’s had appeared in the word ‘Goo…ooogle’.
Fredrick suggested that the sleeping visions were harmless and probably helped us in some way, that homonyms gave poets even more rhymes, that synonyms and words with multiple meanings would enrich the language, that zeroes could have a slash added through them for differentiation, that typewriters were obsolete, that we could get used to the odd words, perhaps some day getting even with them, that the word ‘of’ now rhymed with ‘love’, that ‘Hawaii in New Jersey’ would be seen as a planned tourist attraction, and that Google’s extra “o’s” would probably get used in a marketing ploy as denoting the internet page ranges of interest. — PoeticUniverse
G_d had to create a space in which to allow matter to exist, so It inhaled. This is called the tsimtsum, G_d's contraction or limitation, or even an internal exile. This contraction was catastrophic, there was a shattering of divine vessels of light and for bits of evil were trapped in the material world. — uncanni
end-to-end without even skipping parts — god must be atheist
A Massive Big Bang explosion hardly seems to be a good way of intelligently designing a universe, but rather appears as if something really got out of hand. — PoeticUniverse
2.But seriously, are you really yourself in the world? — Punshhh
To 1. the answer is yes. The answer to 2. is not sure.So you are what you think or know yourself to be and that's all? — Punshhh
The Kabbalah has a complex explanation for the imperfections of the creation, with lots of magical symbols and characters, which lends itself to myth-making.To make a long story from Isaac Luria's Kabbalistic Zohar short:
G_d had to create a space in which to allow matter to exist, so It inhaled. This is called the tsimtsum, G_d's contraction or limitation, or even an internal exile. — uncanni
That's why my alternate version of the scientific theory of "creation" is called Intelligent Evolution. Astronomer Fred Hoyle, who assumed the world was eternal, labeled the proposed Expanding Universe theory as a "Big Bang", in order to ridicule the notion that all of space-time could have emerged from a pin-point in the abyss of no-where & no-when. Imagined as an explosion, it would seem to be self-destructive. Which now seems more plausible, since the fading final days of the universe are currently labeled "Heat Death".A Massive Big Bang explosion hardly seems to be a good way of intelligently designing a universe, but rather appears as if something really got out of hand. — PoeticUniverse
The evolutionary program will eventually run its course, — Gnomon
PU, I would really like to have some of what you're smoking/vaping. — uncanni
"what will happen if . . ." — Gnomon
Yes, I was saying that you are more than you think, or are conditioned to think. That there is a kind of enquiry through contemplation of self, as well as philosophical enquiry, or scientific enquiry.I am what I am regardless of what I think. And I can't be more than what I am.
I did not say I can't be more than what I think I am.
IN HONOR OF NOBODY,
Who can under-stand the universe,
Not even needing a place to stand,
That is nowhere and everywhere,
A wizard creating something of nothing,
Whose imagination reaches the edge
Of forever, beyond, and before. — PoeticUniverse
The nobody that is necessary to understand our universe — Gnomon
:smile: :razz: :grin: :blush: :cool:The price of penny candy went up to a nickel; cigarettes now cost $1000 a pack. (I insured all of my packs, but they were eventually consumed by a series of small fires. My insurance company wouldn’t pay, so I took them to court, where I was convicted of arson.) — PoeticUniverse
:smile: :razz: :grin: :blush: :cool: — Gnomon
I too, have toyed with the notion of a holographic universe as an extension of the Enformationism thesis. If the uni did indeed begin as a minuscule Singularity, then 4 billion years of expansion has stretched the original information over the 2D surface of a thin membrane. In that case, there is no stuff inside the bubble and there is nothing left at the center. Instead, our 3D reality is an interpretation of the 2D information of our FlatLand. Hence, Real Reality is 2D, and Virtual Reality is 3D.Bohm, too, suggested that the whole universe could be thought of as a kind of giant, flowing hologram, or holomovement, in which a total order is contained, in some implicit sense, in the same finite space. — PoeticUniverse
Hence, Real Reality is 2D, and Virtual Reality is 3D. — Gnomon
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