Naturalism and Jediism

Gisteron wrote:

Kyrin Wyldstar wrote: ... if this [creation?] were an ongoing act of evolution instead of a static event then there would be no means to ever ground anything in our reality as truth.

Why not? And if indeed so, how is that different for a "static event"?

The very point of the thought is one in which the existence of some underlying supernatural phenomena that we cant measure, study or grasp and is under some dynamic process of constant change is something we can never know anything about and as such could be capable of changing the very laws of physics as we know them on a whim. Our reality could be one that is constantly being recreated, modified or even just put into existence 5 minutes ago with only the appearance of having existed millennia. Given such a scenario it would be impossible to arrive at any truth in the reality we experience because we can never have direct access to it in any way.

Now given, a supernatural and yet static creation might bring about the same results, But still the static nature of this type of creation lends itself better to something put in motion that must work its course through to finish and therefore one can conclude in this case that, even though true nature of reality can never be known, at least we can discern some truth in the function of the reality we do experience as a constant function.

Manu is correct: I am coming to Jediism from Unitarian Universalism and so, perhaps, I have a propensity to seek for things to fall in together. However, I would ask what the Special Interest Groups do here but try and look at how Jediism and other traditions match together. It is quite possible that I am unfamiliar with the special interest groups but my conception is that these groups look at Jediism through the lens of Abrahamic traditions or vice-versa. I'm not sure that this is much different than that. Also, process-relational and GoB theology are not restricted to religion but are philosophies that are applied to a number of religions. GoB can be found across the major traditions and I have read articles from Baha'is linking process-relational thought to the Baha'i Faith. Perhaps process-relational and GoB theologies have a strong presence within my Unitarian Universalist contexts, so I am already looking at how Jediism matches these?

I also do not understand how looking for the connections is a "why" question. Perhaps I am too focused on the connections but I think there is something important to finding archetypes. From my understanding, Joseph Campbell did the same (looking at the commonalities of myths) which, ultimately, influenced the story from which the terms we use arose. But, as I mentioned, perhaps I have a leaning to do this?

If everything is in constant change, what is keeping it from changing drastically? Is the rock constantly on the verge of changing? If so, what is keeping it from changing? And if not, what is keeping it from the possibility? Process-relational theology states that God is constantly trying to lure reality towards what is best. This means that God is the solution to the problem of perpetual change while yet there is some continuity. This God does not have to be agential, but it does make God the thing necessary for keeping the world together and balanced. This is why Alfred North Whitehead even stipulated that there was a God, not out of a confession.

Not everything in the universe fits together in a neat and tidy box like some tetris puzzle and all tied up in a bow by some benevolent solution providing God though. The universe is messy and it is chaos and it is deadly and it makes no sense in the fact that it is a living breathing paradox. Trying to discern the logic from this is a futile effort. There is no answer for the question you ask. There is no solution that can be provided by a God or any other thing to the puzzle. That's because there is no fucking puzzle! Or at least there is none we will ever make sense of, there is just life. And because of that God is irrelevant. He is not the answer, he is the question. Why do men create Gods to explain things they cant understand? And then when they come to understand new things they push God out to the next plateau in lack of understanding and say, oh he exists there now because we have figured this out!! Its a self aggrandizing celebration of false victory while at the same time using God of the Gaps to fill in the blanks we will never understand so that we can sleep at night. Well I say damn the sleep, I want to get intimate with the uncomfortableness of the dilemma and face my own fears,... and wrestle with them in the sweat soaked sheets so that I may one day conquer them!! Dispel your thoughts of God, Find that concept of God in yourself and set out to defeat it! Because in the end, that is the only thing holding you back.

What you all say makes perfect sense. I cede your points.

Kyrin Wyldstar wrote:

Gisteron wrote:

Kyrin Wyldstar wrote: ... if this [creation?] were an ongoing act of evolution instead of a static event then there would be no means to ever ground anything in our reality as truth.

Why not? And if indeed so, how is that different for a "static event"?

The very point of the thought is one in which the existence of some underlying supernatural phenomena that we cant measure, study or grasp and is under some dynamic process of constant change is something we can never know anything about and as such could be capable of changing the very laws of physics as we know them on a whim. Our reality could be one that is constantly being recreated, modified or even just put into existence 5 minutes ago with only the appearance of having existed millennia. Given such a scenario it would be impossible to arrive at any truth in the reality we experience because we can never have direct access to it in any way.

Now given, a supernatural and yet static creation might bring about the same results, But still the static nature of this type of creation lends itself better to something put in motion that must work its course through to finish and therefore one can conclude in this case that, even though true nature of reality can never be known, at least we can discern some truth in the function of the reality we do experience as a constant function.

Imagine a world of intelligent beings that live in two dimensions, say, on a plane in a larger 3D space, where every point (x,y,z) they can walk or observe satisfies ax+by+cz=0 with some constants a, b, and c. They can see far from all directions of motion, but everything they can see is a projection onto their "existence plane". The equation above may well be something they'd call a law of the universe, a law of nature, of physics, if you will. Every observation they make is mostly consistent with it. Not only that, they are able to construct models to predict, say, not motion trajectories in the 3D space they are embedded in, but rather the projections of those trajectories onto their plane. Much like for us it is helpful to consider spacetime as a composite space, so it may be to them helpful to model their plane as if it were embedded in a three-dimensional space. Maybe it is not a plane exactly but slightly curved, maybe further correction laws will be discovered down the line.
Now, is it true that the world is two-dimensional? Is it true that it is three-dimensional? No, I don't think so. I don't think that the study of nature is a study of truth. They should be no more - nor less - confident in their pursuit of truth for having an additional law, an additional constant, an additional restriction to what the universe can be like to them, than we are. The laws and constants we have describe what we observe, they help us foresee the future. They do not describe what the world is truly like, if it even is "truly like" anything. And if "in truth" we live in but a slice of an n-dimensional parameter space, defined by the laws we identified, if "in truth" there are far fewer constants and laws than apply to us, that means nothing. We are still stuck in the world we live in. These laws apply to us either way. They are arguably not even "truths" about reality so much as models of what we can observe. Their purpose is then not to inform us how things generally are, but to help us work particularly with our experiences. There is nothing to tell us that the laws we perceive are general, fundamental truths. Nor are things that seem whimsical or probabilistic to us necessary without any rhyme or reason also in some submanifold of our variable space.
One way or another, we are stuck with the world we happen to be in, and there is no telling if there even are genuinely different perspectives on it, let alone different worlds altogether. Pragmatically we can speak of lawfulness and whimsy and discover what parts of our world behave in which of those ways. There is definitely some philosophical discussion to be had whether or not any truth can be discovered in a world that is entirely chaotic, but there is quite a number of laws to shave off before conceiving of such a world, and I don't think that any one of the worlds inbetween necessarily yield less truth for its explorers.

I agree with everything you said Gist. I probably need to clarify my points a bit. You are right that the underlying nature of reality may be something we can never discover in the form of a truth. What I am talking about is the truth of the nature of the reality we do experience as you say. We do experience a reality, but we can never know the absolute truth of it. So we must make some assumptions (presuppositions if you will) Those assumptions are that the reality we do experience is real, i.e. - it exists, and that we can learn something about it, i.e.- it is consistent. This is the basis of all knowledge we can obtain.

In this environment it stands to reason that a natural reality would remain consistent as it has no will nor the power to change its nature. However a sentient reality creating entity or one with unlimited power over reality would not only have this power but also quite possibly the inclination to change the nature of the reality it controls as it desires. So this would mean that in your two dimensional world that the beings there would be capable of moving in longitude and latitude only one minute while conceiving of a dimension of height. And then the next minute be capable of moving in all 3 dimensions and never even realize they could once only travel in 2. As well in this sort of reality controlled by a sentient will with unlimited power, time could stop or even go backwards and forwards each time unfolding a different series of events and we in our limited capacity would never know it. This is the sort of changeable reality that I speak of.

Sure. The problem I see is that I have no indication as to how our reality is not like that. We already know that "in truth" pretty much nothing in our world behaves deterministically, close though it may seem to it at times. We can still formulate laws of varying strength for some things whilst leaving others to be modeled strictly stochastically. Maybe in some slice of the world, a sub-world of ours, things that we perceive as "random" follow some weak or strong law that doesn't apply in our super-world. Maybe there too lives a sub-Kyrin and argues that this plane equation is a law that she would expect not to be one if there was some supernatural force that could let it fluctuate any way at will. And maybe in this same sense our world is itself but a slice of yet a broader super-world where what we think as lawful things behave as whimsically and for some reason or for none we don't get to see that.
I understand your point, in that at least as far as we can tell, there seem to be some invariants, some laws that govern if not "true" reality, at least what ever slice we get to work with, and the extent to which it is "consistent" with itself it is not being fooled around with by any magical beings. And yet some things do behave unpredictably just as we would expect them to if no law forced them to be orderly.

I'd also contest just how much of an assumption we need to make before making any sense of the world we find ourselves in. My approach to such things is rather pragmatic. We may need to operate as if we assumed things like the realness of our (presumably) experienced reality, but I wouldn't need to go as far as actually assuming it. If someone were to challenge me on whether or not the world was truly real, I'd have nothing to respond to that challenge.
The very least we need is the observations. Whether we exist, or a thing observed does is unimportant. There is an observation, some kind of factoid and we subjectively feel individually and collectively better off the better we can predict one yet to be made. Though that expression sounds like it assumes the progression of time, I'd say this is an artifact of our language only. We may well say that observations made "at a later date" are just different observations, and a model has predictive power if it is constructed from one subset of the set of observations and matches a superset of that subset irrespective of any progression of time.
Consistency, too, needn't be assumed. A model working only once, or for a short period of time because the world is inconsistent would in my formalism correspond to a model that can predict only a marginally larger set than the set it was derived from. All else being equal, it is inferior to a model that predicts a larger set of observations accurately. The inferiority of the former model is then not a statement about the consistency or lack thereof of the world it aims to describe but rather just about the quality of that model. And this is fairer, too. After all, in practice we would never say that the world is inconsistent just because our internally consistent model contradicted it in some respect. What would that even mean? What for that matter does it mean to say (or to assume) that the world is consistent?
If the model and observations are in conflict, that's all there is to it. We may be tempted to say that the observations are true and the model fails to match them, or that the model is true and that the world is whimsical. But my observations-models-space yield no such sensibilities. The only structure of that space is the measure. While that is entirely subjective, one may say arbitrary, so is everything above and beyond it. This just happens to be what I believe is the very minimal groundwork short of which no assessment of experience can proceed.

yes I can understand all you are saying there. You are right there is no indication that our reality is one of continuity or not. That is the ultimate base of our lack of knowledge. People take this base and insert God but really they have no more basis for doing this than we do for making any other such claim of continuity. So we are left only with the question. However we must start somewhere, and where is start is what I called assumptions. But more succinctly they are presuppositions we adopt in order to begin to make the argument that what we experience is real and consistent. This is one step removed from that question but for us, we can get no lower in our acquisition of knowledge.

And yes very much so the possibility exists that there are not only one but many sub-kyrins. The very basis of String Theory teaches this in its 10-11 dimensional construct. That in those higher dimensions of the subatomic exists not the reality we experience but only possibility. The possible futures and pasts that do not exist for us in our reality. And still higher in these compactified realms exists even the possibilities of non existence altogether until we finally get to a place where all things are possible and exist simultaneously. This may be the true base that our reality exists on, but will we ever know this? I cant say. What I can say is that currently all we presuppose we know is not absolute but really only a conditionally subjective model that we can compare with others to try and arrive at an objective yet still conditional conclusion. And even then the results are less than optimal.