Life is very very complicated, and who knows if anything exists anywhere? What if there's no heaven? What happens after death? And money. Why do we think small green slips have value? What does the term "life" really mean? Why are we here? What is time? What does "something" mean in a philosophical context? Maybe everyone lives in separate universes and reality is just small glimpses into another person's universe. Reality is madness, no one is ever going to be able to figure it out.

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Why do we think small green slips have value?

I can answer that one, it's because it's by and large agreed upon that they have value. They have value because we give it value.

And what about one variable somewhere on some servers of banks (onlinebanking) set have so much value, that is also funny.

And yeah, why do we exist, i mean, we'r all going to die eventually anyways.

Are you saying that to convince us that you do exist ? How could we trust in you because you say that you could believe that we don't exist ?

Moreover, how can you be sure that you really exist ? Isn't it an illusion ? As a case in point, AI in computer games have the illusion that they exist, but it is not true.

Anything that you imagine does, in some way, exists, but they aren't always what they look like. For example if you think of a dragon, that makes it exist. Not as a dragon, but as a pattern in the electromagnetic fields incide your brain. Even ai in games exists, but what you think is a zombie walking towards you is yust a pattern of bits in ram, which gets continuosly modyfied based on other patterns of bits. A part of those bits is then sent to a screen, in which they control tiny dots of light, which our brain sees as an image of a zombie. But for us to be able to see the zombie, the patterns of bits must exist.
So we do deffinately exist, but we might not be humans, but just some patterns of something.

Whatever I say here, I can't be completely sure of; nobody can be absolutely sure of his beliefs with these kind of questions.

I think that the human mind is purely material, there is no kind of "purpose" to the universe or the human race, and there is nothing beyond death.
And how this universe got here, is one of the greatest questions... What made the universe come into existence? If it one believes that it is by a creator of some kind, how did he come into existence?

Regardless of whether or not humanity has a purpose...
To think that every one of us is descended from basic cells that fortunately happened to form on a small planet, around an average star, on the edge of a normal galaxy is astonishing.
And if you look at yourself, all the matter in your body can be traced back to billions of years ago, where a star at the end of its life spewed its guts out into space that eventually came to form you. You are literally comprised of those stars.
It's all quite amazing

Without meaning to provoke any big religious debates, can you show me those 5 proofs? I'm still very open to any evidence for a god.

To think that we all came from air that formed would be amazing too, though equally untrue.

Hm? Not sure what you mean by this

Plz: keep this philosophical and not religious, thank you.

His argument seems to deal greatly with a "first cause" or something to set the universe and life into motion.
So it seems like he used God as the first cause... but then what created that god?
Even if we ignore the fact that it contradicts his rule that everything must have been set into motion by something else, why is this "first mover" necessarily going to be God?

I actually picked up a book somewhat relating to this. Lawrence Krauss's book "A Universe from Nothing."
It apparently addresses how the universe could arise from nothing naturally.
I dunno how he's going to do it, but it looks interesting

Quote from: mdr1 on May 13, 2013, 01:00:46 pm

Are you saying that to convince us that you do exist ? How could we trust in you because you say that you could believe that we don't exist ?

Moreover, how can you be sure that you really exist ? Isn't it an illusion ? As a case in point, AI in computer games have the illusion that they exist, but it is not true.

But AI does not think. It goes by a set of instructions. Even learning AI does not think, and, if it did, how would we know?

Neural networks don't quite "think." Static FFNA's (Feed forward Neural Networks), the standard type in most research, are actually just functions that take inputs and map them to outputs. Only if you accept functionalism and reductive physicalism can you begin to say neural networks can "think" in any capacity. If you also want to say that such a network can be processed by a computer, then you have to drag in the huge overhead of the Church-Turing thesis and throw out all neural networks with irrational edge weights and node states. Unfortunately, with the exception of the Church-Turing thesis, all of these are highly contentious things to present in an argument and it's why neural nets are basically laughed at in most philosophy departments nowadays.

what definition of "think" is being used here? personally, i like to consider any thing which can respond to stimuli, retain information, and modify its responses based upon that information as a "thinking thing", and leave any distinctions beyond that as a matter of degree.

I have five different proofs for why He would have to exist.

please don't bring up aquinas. i had quite enough of him in not-quite-catholic school
understand that the following is about aquinas himself and his so-called "proofs" and not me making any statement about whether or not a god exists.

"proof" number one starts with this statement early on:
"Now whatever is in motion is put in motion by another, for nothing can be in motion except it is in potentiality to that towards which it is in motion"
he then follows it up with:
"Therefore it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, put in motion by no other", which is, very obviously, a direct contradiction of his earlier statement. thus, if his logic is to be trusted, what he has actually proven by contradiction is that not all things are put in motion by another, a matter completely unrelated to whether or not a god exists.

number two is a mirror image of his first. he states that "no thing can be the efficient cause of itself", then follows it up with "god is the efficient cause of himself", meaning that, if his logic is to be trusted, some things spontaneously come into existence without any outside influences. again, this is unrelated to whether or not a god exists.

the third begins with the un-backed claim that all things cease to exist (which flies directly in the face of the classical idea of conservation of energy), then an un-backed claim that the default state of any thing which can cease to exist is necessarily nothingness (his first claim that all things must go from existence to non-existence is unrelated to the claim that all things must come *from* non-existence into existence [incidentally, there is some evidence that particles can, in fact, come into existence spontaneously]). his last statement is a repetition of the last line of the previous two, "there must, necessarily, be some thing which has always existed and caused other things to exist", a statement completely unrelated to the rest of this current "proof". he then jumps to the conclusion that, because "something" exists, that "something" must necessarily be his God (by the way, he did this exact same thing in the previous two).

the fourth is even sillier than the others (he makes the statement that fire is the cause of all things that are hot, for one, but that's neither here nor there as it's just an analogy). he begins with the statement that any one thing can either be more or less x than another thing, where x is some quality. he then says that this judgement is always made in relation to some absolute which is "most" x. this assumption is not only un-backed, but counter-intuitive. more and less are used to compare two things to one another. it makes no sense to say that any one thing is "the epitomy" of x. one could say that a single thing is the most "x" in existence (i.e., nothing before has ever reached such a degree of "x". there has never been a material which was as hot as this one is currently, for example). however, for any such thing that has a clearly-defined denotation of "more" or "less", it is possible to continue imagining something which is "more" ad infinitum, just as it is always possible to imagine a number larger or smaller than any given number. there is no ultimately hot, big, small, etc thing or anything else which can be applied to a discernible level of degree in that way. he then goes on to apply his assumption to something completely different: "goodness", a thing which does not exist on a clearly defined plane because it has no clear definition. just like other subjective qualities (beauty, for example, which, as the adage says, is in the eyes of the beholder), there is no one definition of what is "better or worse" in the same way as there is for what is "faster and slower" or "bigger and smaller". lastly, he wraps things up with two baseless claims, firstly jumping from the assertion that "every single category which is related to the concept of 'goodness' has something or other as its uppermost echelon" to "every single category which is related to the concept of 'goodness' has a single thing as its uppermost echelon", and then stating that "that single thing must necessarily be my God".

his fifth argument is a bit incoherent, so i've never been sure if i understood it quite right. it seems like he is trying to say that "any thing which reacts in a predictable manner cannot do so without an intelligent thought directing it to do so", which makes no sense at all.