Blu: It keeps coming down to this.

You keep wanting to anthropomorphize the universe

TransJ: Not at all, I'm talking about a non-human universal mind. 

to imply that it knows what it's doing, that it deliberately created sentient beings, that it's aware of itself.

Sorry, but  these are your words not mine, at this point in our debate. However I will add that I'm building my case one point at a time. 

I collide with this view at every turn, and I keep asking you to show it's true, but I get unintelligible replies eg -

Actually what you are colliding with is the essential universals (generic) for any mind to exist and even matter. 

mind in the human or animal sense is derived from activity and so would be the cosmic mind, which means we are talking about mind generically...The universe is a reality and as such it can affect itself and so do human or animal minds...Sentience in the generic sense is a capacity of some kind. The sentience of the universe is its capacity for creating an intelligible reality out of itself.

I think all those propositions are false

Thats your option. You should have no trouble proving me wrong, if they are indeed all false.

However I would add the proposition  that the cosmic mind is the generic  unity in reality.  What I mean by unity is that the parts act  as a single unit of activity, if they do not than what we have is “merely a physical reality” or a heap of stuff. 

and the last one doesn't refer to sentience but to some entirely different concept. Whatever it is, I suggest you rename it 'furp' to avoid confusion with real sentience.

It stands as it is unless you can provide sufficient reasons for it to be other wise.

Reality is not intelligible until evolution happens to produce a nervous system sufficiently complex to understand things (ie to make them intelligible). As far as we know, the universe was over 13 billion years old before that happened.  Until then the universe could not be intelligible - the concept didn't exist, because it needs a brain to exist.

So according to you the intelligibility of the universe is just a concept in human brains just like Donald Duck. And as such it is not the objective nature of reality but it is what we imagine reality to be, by your way of thinking. So you and Scientist  are not observing an intelligible reality but imposing intelligibility on reality. How then are you and Scientist making objective observations about reality, if you are correct?

How do you know that gods are impossibilities?

I don't...

Then we agree gods are possible.

I feel pessimistic that this conversation is going to result in my understanding what you're saying.

I hope that is not the case Blu.

Jul 18, 2011 -- 12:33AM, TransJ wrote:

So according to you the intelligibility of the universe is just a concept in human brains just like Donald Duck. And as such it is not the objective nature of reality but it is what we imagine reality to be, by your way of thinking. So you and Scientist  are not observing an intelligible reality but imposing intelligibility on reality. How then are you and Scientist making objective observations about reality, if you are correct?

TransJ,

Like mankind being at the physical center of the universe - a concept only recently dispelled by science - Blu is quite positive in his belief at being at the center of all universal meaning, as a human with our "objective" nervous system of "magic" matter.

Rather than see the obvious - from a thermodynamical view - where normative chemical and matter/energy processes - transforms states of "REAL and OBJECTIVE" information and meaning, according to logic and information processing rules.

I see no reason to think he will have the obvious logic of your comment hit home.  His belief is too strong.

Ronald Lewis Tarter in his 2002 monograph titled "The God Theory," presents one interesting, though admitedly far fetched, possibility for a sentient universe.  He proposes that if the hypothetical and yet to be discovered energy strings that are thought to form the basis of the universe were interconnected in the manner of the neurons in the human brain, then a stupendous sentient intelligence could arise.   No doubt Blu will rush to say that there are lots of ifs there, still....

Jul 19, 2011 -- 1:53PM, JimRigas wrote:

Ronald Lewis Tarter in his 2002 monograph titled "The God Theory," presents one interesting, though admitedly far fetched, possibility for a sentient universe.  He proposes that if the hypothetical and yet to be discovered energy strings that are thought to form the basis of the universe were interconnected in the manner of the neurons in the human brain, then a stupendous sentient intelligence could arise.   No doubt Blu will rush to say that there are lots of ifs there, still....

Jim,

We already know the universe is interconnected in a very weak way through gravity.  At the edge of modern research is the Holographic Principle.  IF - one accepts information as real (sorry Blu and others) than there is another level of universal interconnectedness.

This is not wishful or metaphysical - it is approaching science fact.  S. Hawking thought inforamtion could be lost - and after 30 years admitted he was wrong - that the Holographic Principle was right!!

from the Wiki article

The physical universe is widely seen to be composed of "matter" and "energy". In his 2003 article published in Scientific American magazine, Jacob Bekenstein summarized a current trend started by John Archibald Wheeler, which suggests scientists may "regard the physical world as made of information, with energy and matter as incidentals." Bekenstein quotes William Blake and asks whether the holographic principle implies that seeing "the world in a grain of sand," could be more than "poetic license".^[12]

Unexpected connection

Bekenstein's topical overview "A Tale of Two Entropies" describes potentially profound implications of Wheeler's trend in part by noting a previously unexpected connection between the world of information theory and classical physics. This connection was first described shortly after the seminal 1948 papers of American applied mathematician Claude E. Shannon introduced today's most widely used measure of information content, now known as Shannon entropy. As an objective measure of the quantity of information, Shannon entropy has been enormously useful, as the design of all modern communications and data storage devices, from cellular phones to modems to hard disk drives and DVDs, rely on Shannon entropy.

Blu,

Who knows.  Maybe it has a yen for black holes.