I Cant Stop Laughing About This!

So after I'm done typing the mwi trinity post, i look at this book the big green one of course, and inside of it, just glancing, I'm like shaking I'm laughing about this so much, anyways, ill just quote and let y'all figure it out

"Stephen Hawkings atheistic argument amounts to this howler:

1) If Euclidean spacetime is physically existent and Lorentizian spacetime a theoretical fiction, then there is no real time at which the universe began to exist.

2) If there is no real time at which the universe began to exist, then there is no real beginning that God created.

3) Euclidean spacetiime physically exists and Lorentzian spacetime does not.

Therefore,

4) There is no real beginning created by God

Therefore,

5) God doesn't exist."

(are you ready are you ready here comes the punchline to the whole joke, I I I I don't know, ill let smith speak for himself)

"This is probably the worst atheistic argument in the history of Western thought"

In my short years of studying this subject, I don't think I've ever run across something else like it. What's worse, I can see the smile on his face while telling me about this. Well, at least hes honest, right?

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MWI Trinity Argument

How can people draw different conclusions from the same data? Some of the arguments that Quentin makes uses data that is normally used for theism, the fine tuning argument about the coincidences in nature that created human life, and draws atheistic and naturalistic and etc. arguments about it and has good arguments for it, but the reason the arguments are good is because that same intuition or understanding there, but what exactly is it that makes people draw these different conclusions from the same data? Even in his life, the priorities and values you decide determine the course of your life, revaluation of all values, that’s what it comes down to, what is your value hierarchy and why is it in that order? Its all an argument about values, one way to describe it, but why do I think of god here, why not think that this means that god doesn’t exist, good arguments can be made for both sides. The many worlds interpretation, why was I thinking of that, oh yeah, modal realism, that’s what I was thinking about, so obviously, all conceivable and probably inconceivable worlds exist somehow, we can think of them and conceptualize them, but just because we haven’t done that, doesn’t mean that they don’t exist yet. We exist, ourselves existing is enough to prove that all of the above exists as well. JWhat is this wall that you defend? Oh oh ohohoh my undestanding of philosophy, too fucking dramatic, I need to listen to my mom, theirs a reason you have the parents in your life that you do, at least mine, two core lessons, don’ be so dramatic Jason, and life goes on, with and without you, always and forever as phyllis and my dad would say, basically, ok, all the ones before and after us existed, so that’s a shitload of possible worlds, possibly infinite for all we know, argument right there for mwi and Lewis modal realism, I won’t grant that to you, a shitload, but not infinite, add in all the ones we think about while we are in these shitload but not infinite states of being, that old language, sure, why not, states, whatever, were chillin, writing philosophy, arguing about this shit, thinking about even more shit, how many times, before, all of THAT, which could possibly be infinite, but whatever, what about all that will exist, that’s a much bigger leap, obviously, but if it’s conceivable in principle, and couldn’t possibly everything be conceivable in principle, then its potentiality to exist is there, but is the grand ol title of reality granted to us by us philosopher kings of our little human universe, to the potentiality, but not the instantiation, actualization, existence as we experience ition, so many names, LIFE, being, philosophy of mind, rambling, does it exist, should we crown our potentiality and conceivability as existing, or not. But I’m biased, I have mystic intuitions that indra’s net is how reality is structured at it’s most foundationalist primal fundamental core, so there is my fine tuning argument, religious data and the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics and Lewis’ modal realism are all arguments for the conceivably infinite, and possibility inconceivably infinite, plantinga’s argument is much better than anselms, just because he phrases it better, is it just the language though? Is that all it comes down to tedla, intutions and the decision to exist by them or extinguish them in the flames of non-existence, so cognitive deficienty huh, what else could it be, I don’t buy hta though, I can’t believe plantinga believes that atheists are cogntiviely deficient, I love his argument and his free will defense speaks for itself, but I think it can be subsumed under hick’s soulmaking, obviously, because freedom does mean freedom, the greatest gift the one could give us, so does that perfet possible world exist, yeah, of course it exists, but god couldn’t create it, freedom means freedom, so hands off, but we could’ve created it oiurself, we just didn’t in this one, but it’s the one we’ve got, and maybe that’s the lesson we need to learn, then we’ll be there, just a little bit late, a lot of ships, levaeing for this rivesr of existence in all of these worlds, three reasons for my mysticism, maybe two, oh god, I know what your doing sucka, whose wedding I’m going to this summer, another one bites the dust with Isaac too, damn, dropping like flies, I coulda been one of them, but not, I’ve stayed true, not by my own coure though, yes and no, see, that’s my problem, the many worlds interpretation causes me to be indecisive in my practical life, I think I’m going ot play my football game now, but I had fun today, even with the snow storm, so were not going over there, he’s got priorities, YEAH right, I won’t say your name sweetheart, but welcome back to quentin’s world, lol, but what do I know about any of this, absolutely nothing, the many worlds interpretation, so I can only imagine, you old dog you, is this the kind of person I want myself to learn about in this life Can’t argue for it tonight though, of course you know why, tonight is when I create the ideas, other nights either myself or others will argue for them, fuck you analytic philosophy, no I don’t mean that, well, I do and I don’t, but that’s just how I roll, well, it’s the balance between the reason and science h logic, and the intuition, which is your ugly older brother,

i just thought of this, so i thought i would put it on here, i think that everything possible and impossible never doesn't exist, nietzsche would say why don't we embrace the ontological fullness of what all of reality is and could be?
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I'm a Panentheist

Some highlights from this article are

All things are part of God but God is more than the sum of all things

and

In contrast, panentheism holds that God pervades the world, but is also beyond it. He is immanent and transcendent, relative and Absolute. This embracing of opposites is called dipolar. For the panentheist, God is in all, and all is in God.

Awesome stuff, huh!

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This is Maher's doing!

So Maher and I are writing back and forth because he's kinda going through a spiritual 'crisis' at this point in his life and i mentioned this experience that i had to him and he wanted to know the details of it. what follows is my response to his request. Enjoy!


oh geez maher, i knew you were gonna ask me this question after i said what i said to you. geez, it is personal and i don't normally like talking about it in detail with people, but your not just people. so i guess i'll talk about it in detail with you. briefly though, or at least as brief as i can be.

i've had several 'experiences' which have shaped my beliefs about religion and philosophy and how the universe and existence itself is structured, but there is one specifically that sticks out as 'the' experience and it is this one that i was talking to you about. i won't go into too many of the details, but basically i interpreted this experience as a direct contact with my soul. it was clear to me, at that time, that all of the things we have in our mind, all the ordinary mundane things we always think about all of the time, are complete bullshit and only hinder our minds from seeing the truth that our soul is always trying to communicate to us, but is unable to because we can't get past all of these other mental things in order to perceive that our soul even exists, much less that it is always trying to make contact with us. that was the first thing that struck me about the experience.

the second thing that struck me about this experience was that it seemed true, no, i knew that it was true, in a way that i have never known anything else to be true in my entire life. im sure being familiar with philosophy you know a little bit about epistemic justification what reasons we give for certain of our beliefs to be true and other ones to be false. their are different methods for justification. we can appeal to reason and logic and say this stuff is true because it follows these logical rules, it's a well-reasoned argument, etc., etc. another method is to appeal to what descartes called clear and distinct ideas. this is basically an appeal to our intuition, meaning that we believe it because it feels true, it is, at least to us, self-evidently true. the thing about my experience is that I got the feeling that what i was experiencing was, not just self-evidently true, but like self-evidentially true on steriods or like self-evidentially true times 5 or something like that. take the most self-evident truth you have, multiply the feeling of certainty you have regarding this truth by a factor of about 5 or 7 times, and that is the feeling i got regarding this experience. it just had an ontological realness to it that was head and shoulders above any other experience of reality that i have had before that day or after that day. this was the second thing that was impressed upon me that day.

the third thing that this experience contained was the idea that this experience was an experience of my own soul and the truth that we have direct contact with our soul through our conscience or 'inner voice' as a lot of people call it. i was doing my senior thesis at this time and it was on personal identity and i rejected the bodily identity theory and locke's consciousness theory and hume saying personal identity didn't exist theory and was looking for a theory of my own and then this 'experience' happened to me this night in which basically i found what i was looking for. hume was right in saying that it is a contradiction to assume we have any sort of identity while everything about us is constantly changing and shifting and what not. the conclusion i came to, because of this night, is that the only way to explain our identity because of hume's objections was that this sense of personal identity comes from our soul, which exists outside the spatio-temporal reality we experience in our everyday lives. i think i came to this conclusion a little bit later, but as far as the experience itself goes in this respect, i had the impression that i was experiencing my soul and that our conscience, our inner voice, is our soul communicating with us on this plane of reality.

the last thing, if i remember correctly, that i got directly from the experience itself, is that because of this direct contact of our souls with our earthly selves, there is no true religion nor any sort of objective morality from which all people can and should follow. well, let me rephrase that, there is a true religion and there is a true objective morality that we should follow, but it's different for every individual soul in existence. this is because the true religion and the true objective morality is your conscience, what your soul tells you you should do and what you should believe. i'm sure your familiar with objective and truth in ethics vs subjective and relativism in ethics, well, i realized that night that both are kinda true. their is an objective truth in ethics, but that objective truth is totally relative to your own individual soul. it's basically the idea of a sacred contract, to use caroline myss's terminology, that what is true and right for you is dependent upon your soul and is thus, different for every person in existence. it is because of this reason that i say things to you like listen to your heart and the only true religion is self-knowledge of the soul and stuff like that. it is because this idea of each individual soul as the basis for each person's religion and morality was, i think, quite literally, revealed to me by god that night.

geez maher, i could say a bunch of other things right now but i think i'll leave it at that. most of my other beliefs are things i've inferred from this experience or other experiences that i had or from stuff i've read. (like the idea of the oversoul and stuff and the perennial philosophy and stuff like that), but as far as the bare bones the things i think remember the experience imparting to me, these four stand out as more constituative of the revelation than other things i believe or say or write about or talk about. these are in no particular order either, i don't remember when i realized one or the other, but all of them i realized that night. 1) the cloudiness of our mind which prevents us from seeing the truth our direct contact with our soul, 2) the ontological and epistemic weight that this experience had (at the time it seemed much more real and true to me than me typing you this email right now), 3) the inner voice which is our soul trying to contact us and 4) that our soul is, or at least should be, the basis of our beliefs about religion and morality. i'm pretty certain that these are the four things that i believe were revealed to me that night.

geez, i can't believe i just did that, hmm, well now you know a lot more about me than you did before, so there. but if you want me to tell you some more things that i've extrapolated from these beliefs or any of my other experiences that have also contributed to what i believe i will be glad to share. as far as your lack of experiences since you lost your passion for islam, i think this has more to do with your loss of passion than with what your passion was directed at, which in this case was islam. you know as well, your probably just going through a dark time in your life right now. all true mystics have that period, st. john of the cross called it the dark night of the soul. i actually went through the worst time in my life for the next 3 months after i had this experience. i've just been through a pretty dark time recently because marie and i broke up after thanksgiving.

so i don't know maher, i rejected the religion i was raised with and a few years later, philosophy started bringing me back to religion and then i had this experience and know i'm a perennialist mystic who takes good truths from all the religions as my own and leave what doesn't feel right to me. i can't swallow christianity whole because i disagree with their theology, specifically the incarnation and the theory of atonement, so i like islams better with their emphasis on the unitary oneness of god and am totally a muslim, theologically speaking, but i don't like islam's lack of emphasis on agape love, and totally identify with christianity's emphasis on loving your enemies. so the thing i don't like in christianity makes me identify with islamic theology and philosophy but the thing i don't like in islam makes me identify with christian ethics and practice. and i can't even tell you how eastern thought fits in with all of this.

i don't know if any of this helps, probably not, but if you want to respond to any of it, that would be fine. thanks for making me write this, it may be the most succinct and concise statement of my mystical experience that i've ever written. i think i'm gonna put it on my blog. hope things are going better for you, if you want, let's keep dialoging, you keep giving me objections and telling me about your problems and i'll keep trying to come up with solutions to them and together maybe we can come to some sort of consensus or conclusion and maybe that will help you out right now. talk to you soon

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A Little Modal Metaphysical Paradox for You!

Found this on Cheryl's website, it's awesome, check it out!

Which world is actual? Presumably, there is a proposition that states which world is actual. We take it that our world is actual, and all other worlds are merely possible. We'll call our world W. Now, the proposition stating this is simply, "W is the actual world." Is this true or false? Obviously, W is actual, since I've just named our world, the actual world, W. But now the question arises: is this proposition true in any other possible world? At first it would seem that it must be, since it is the actual world, it is true, so it should be true in other possible worlds, right? But if the proposition is indeed true in all possible worlds, then it is necessarily true. Uh-oh. It would turn out that actuality of the actual world is a necessary feature of it. But this would break down the whole notion of possibility in the first place, since the whole meaning of possibility is that some other world might have been actual. But if the proposition stating that, "W is the actual world", is true in all possible worlds, then none of the merely possible worlds could have been actual. But what does it mean to say that some possible world, say W₁, is possible and thus could have been actual? It is to say that the proposition, "W₁ is the actual world", is true in some possible world. Which world? Why, in W₁ of course! Each possible world is actual in itself. (Or in other words, the proposition stating that a given possible world is actual is true in that world, but not true in all the other worlds.) But now actuality turns into a world-relative feature. The actual world W is only contingently actual, thus the proposition stating such is not true in all possible worlds. But if it is not true in all possible worlds, and what is true in each possible world is the proposition stating that that world itself is actual, then each world is actual in that world (in itself), and actuality is world-relative. But if actuality is world-relative, each world to itself, then nothing metaphysically distinguishes our world from amongst the infinitely many, apparently merely possible worlds. If there is nothing metaphysically distinct about our world, and its actuality is merely relative from this particular world, then we must swallow the claim that all possible worlds exist, and actuality is merely indexical.

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