Leo's Blog Discussion Mega-Thread

[Jacob Morres]

@PsychedelicEagle pros and cons to it tho, no? Consensus generally has high rates of accuracy and repeatability

[erikchomko]

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God can’t change its own ontology, God cannot change what it is or how Consciousness works. Skeptics love to turn this into a contradiction against Omnipotence. 

If you can't change the structure of your being, how can you be said to be omnipotent? 
 

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No! It’s not a contradiction.

Need better argumentation here 
 

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Truth/Being/Consciousness has a definite nature, an absolute nature. The nature of Truth/Being/Consciousness cannot be changed, not even by God, and this does not contradict Omnipotence.

You haven't explained why this doesn't' contradict it

[Leo Gura]

31 minutes ago, erikchomko said:

If you can't change the structure of your being, how can you be said to be omnipotent? 

Omnipotence means that Consciousness can hallucinate anything it wants. But the ontology of Consciousness cannot be changed.

A TV screen can display any image, but the screen is the screen and its nature cannot be changed by displaying new images.

God is limited in that it cannot not be God. The fact that Consciousness can hallucinate anything cannot change. Skeptics want to use this point as evidence against God, which is false.

Edited 1 hour ago by Leo Gura

[trenton]

@Leo Gura you mentioned you were killing mosquitoes and then realized you were committing a genocide.

I just now had a similar problem. I recently learned about the spotted lantern fly. It is considered a parasite that destroys a lot of trees in my part of America. The government and various authoritative sources encouraged squashing the insects and destroying the eggs.

Prior to this information, I simply observed one of these insects and started trying to figure out what it might be. Once I got this information from the government that it was a parasite that it wanted help eliminating, then I started thinking that killing these parasites would make me a good citizen.

I just got back home from my walk. I found one of their breeding grounds and squashed a whole bunch of them. I can't count how many. Other people saw me squashing them and cheered me on for being a good citizen. However, once the dead bodies started piling up, I started having second thoughts.

I started thinking, "oh, this is mass murder." I then started thinking of this behavior was really conducive to higher consciousness. Maybe I was being helpful to ridding parasites from nearby plants, but higher consciousness and being a good citizen come apart easily when being a good citizen means commiting a genocide.

Now I'm thinking about something like a Nazi who was trying to be good by ridding his nation of a parasite only to kill countless Jews.

[Leo Gura]

@trenton Yup, that's the pickle of it.

[Rafael Thundercat]

26 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

Omnipotence means that Consciousness can hallucinate anything it wants. But the ontology of Consciousness cannot be changed.

A TV screen can display any image, but the screen is the screen and its nature cannot be changed by displaying new images.

God is limited in that it cannot not be God. The fact that Consciousness can hallucinate anything cannot change. Skeptics want to use this point as evidence against God, which is false.

I was rewatching the episode about why God cant be proven. Is crazy that one cant watch the same many times and every time a new nuance from the whole episode pops up. 

Like this:

There is an assumption within science, for example, that reality is contingent and not necessary or absolute, that, for example, existence cannot be a tautology. Tautology is assumed to be a mistake, but it's not. God is absolute tautology. God has to exist.

God cannot not exist. That's the most important aspect of God. Its existence is absolutely necessary. But this presents a problem to materialists, scientists, and atheists because they are only used to dealing with relative stuff, contingent stuff that cannot exist or exist depending on various circumstances and factors. They've never dealt with it with an absolute before, and so they instinctively react negatively towards this idea of anything being tautological.

Right? Like absolute truth cannot be tautological. Or can it? It must be, because it's absolutely true. It's true under all circumstances.

And all of logic actually hinges upon consciousness and absolute truth, just in ways that are not very obvious. You have to go very deep in your consciousness and in your development to understand how logic arises out of the existence of absolute truth. That's not a simple thing to understand or to explain here, so I won't even try.

But if absolute truth didn't exist and logic couldn't work, that's something I'll explain in the future. This leads us to the problem of self-evidence.

The Problem of Self-Evidence

In the end, there's absolutely no way around at least one self-evident thing. You cannot have any working epistemology or metaphysics or sense making or knowledge without something being self-evident. Whether you're doing science, religion, anything, you need something that's self-evident because without that you couldn't know anything.

So for example, self-evident things that are common within human knowledge are things like reason. Logic is taken as self-evident. The law of non-contradiction is taken as self-evident. The law of identity is taken as self-evident. Analytic statements like "bachelor's are unmarried men" is taken as self-evident. Various primitive mathematics like 1 + 1 = 2 is taken as self-evidence. Intuition can be taken as self-evident. The existence of other people is often taken as self-evident. Scientific method is often taken as self-evident. Direct experience can be taken as self-evidence. Induction. These are just some examples.

You need something like that to have any kind of epistemology. But what is the most self-evident of all things? It's that you exist and that you're conscious. There can be nothing more fundamental than that. Everything else depends upon that. Because if you don't exist and you're not conscious, there can't be logic, there can't be science, there can't be a universe, there can't be other people, there can't be an external world. There can't be objectivity, there can't be history, there can't be time, there can't be space, and there can't be atoms. There can't be anything. All of that assumes that you exist.

So very paradoxically, the reason God cannot be proven is precisely because it exists. Existence cannot be proven because it's the only self-evident thing. It's the self-evident thing. Existence is absolute self-evidence. Existence exists to itself for itself. Not to a human, not to a subject, not to a brain, not to a biological living being.

There's just existence. Existence exists as an absolute. That's what this is. This has been mistaken for something else, which is the illusion that God spins to construct a human life. God is existence. It is not even proper to say that God exists because God is existence. Anything that exists is God.

[Leo Gura]

@Rafael Thundercat Yeah, that's good stuff.