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Tom
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| Posted 1/22/2009 7:59 AM (GMT -6) |   | | | |
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One Love
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One Love
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| Posted 1/22/2009 11:41 AM (GMT -6) | | Indra's Net
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.
"I love, therefore I am in I Am. God is my life." | | Back to Top | | |
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Tom
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| Posted 1/22/2009 12:02 PM (GMT -6) | | From the article:
The holograms you find on credit cards and banknotes are etched on two-dimensional plastic films. When light bounces off them, it recreates the appearance of a 3D image. In the 1990s physicists Leonard Susskind and Nobel prizewinner Gerard 't Hooft suggested that the same principle might apply to the universe as a whole. Our everyday experience might itself be a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface.
The "holographic principle" challenges our sensibilities. It seems hard to believe that you woke up, brushed your teeth and are reading this article because of something happening on the boundary of the universe.
It's interesting, sure. But it raises very important questions. If my experience (and my choices) are merely the projection of "something happening on the boundary of the universe," then what happens to freedom? I think this guy would say it's gone. Note his explanation: your experience follows "because of" something happening on the boundary of the universe. It's that "because of" relationship that's crucial. But if whatever I ACTUALLY am is sufficient to locate the determination of my choices in ME, then whatever's happening on the boundary of the universe is academic really.
Until I hear some proponent of this view explain how freedom would work, I'm skeptical. I'm not gonna jump on just because it feels like idealism.
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Tom
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| Posted 1/22/2009 12:08 PM (GMT -6) | | The other problem with the analogy is that credit cards are NOT two-dimensional films, and "etching" itself is a three-dimensional reality. It carves a form INTO the surface. The surface has to have depth as well as height and width to receive the etching. It's anything but two-dimensional. In fact, the only two-dimensional realities are abstract geometric objects.
But anyhow.
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One Love
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| Posted 1/22/2009 12:30 PM (GMT -6) | | | Read Nesteruk here.
Light from the East.
"The logoi of Creation and the World"
Pages 101-107.
See anything that works?
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.
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One Love
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| Posted 1/22/2009 12:41 PM (GMT -6) | | also...
From Greg's Trinity and Process, pages 394-395
God's Relationship to Non-Divine Reality
The disposition of God to create a non-divine reality--which is itself a contingent feature of God's necessary disposition to be God --is thus a disposition to create experiential centers of, and contributors to, non-divine beauty. It is a disposition to create a matrix of relations with ordinal centers, each of which enjoys and/or contributes to an approximation of divine beauty. The divine disposition "diffuses itself" (Edwards) into a multiplicity of dispositions which "aim at" a unique actualization, a unique perspective on reality, which is defined either as an contribution to, and/or an experience of, beauty.
It is at this point of this "diffusion" that the distinction between God and the non-divine world occurs. The multiplicity of dispositions towards non-divine realities are themselves non-divine in their concrescence. The "termini" of God's creative act is not (as with Neville) the creature act itself, but the beginning of the (not wholly determined) disposition of the creature which shall act. The non-divine disposition arises out of God--it is an aspect of God's self-disposition to delight in Godself--and results in what is not God.
As with Edwards, we can in this way assert that God's creativity is, in one sense,"the substance of bodies", the "ens entium" of all things, without thereby endorsing pantheism. But this in our scheme carried through more consistently than was possible in Edwards because we have not held that this creativity toward non-divine realities is in any sense necessary. The relative autonomy of the non-divine dispositions is manifested in their autonomous--viz. not divinely determined--creativity, though their relative dependence is manifested in their tie to the primordial disposition of God as the ground of their creativity. The divine ground defines the parameters within which the preordained role of the entity within the matrix of being can be played, through exactly how this creativity is in particular actualized is their own doing. The divine ground thus defines the essence of the non-divine creature without thereby undermining the autonomous integrity of the creature: indeed, it is the divine ground of the creature's essence which allows the creature space to be autonomous.
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I submit that the bolded part Greg is talking about is like unto the relationship of the uncreated logoi (inseparable from the One Logos) with the created "ends", non-divine reality concresence. It just goes well with Nesteruk's whole idea that you will see in that section I gave you. Here's Nesteruk. See if you see what I see...
The logoi of natural created beings, which are the forming principles and ideas of the sensible and intelligible worlds, are our primary interest here. On the one hand, we apprehend these logoi as existing through the links with their common source, the divine Logos; on the other hand, the same logoi can be considered with the respect ot the world, which is constituted by them. This latter inquiry into the nature of the logoi is exercised through "natural contemplation" (philosophically speaking) of the created being and thus represents a subject of theological ontology.
The whole world is seen, then, as manifesting the different intensities (condensations) of the incarnation of the Logos, which is mysteriously hidden in God's logoi under the surface of the created being. The task of ontology is to contemplate these logoi, that is, to establish the fact of their existence with respect to sensible and intelligible things and then through generalization to establish their unity with respect to the common source of their existence, the divine Logos.
The important point, which was raised by Maximus, is that the logoi have a complex relationship to the Divine (the Logos of God) and to the concrete created world in the multitude of its manifestations. On the one hand, according to Maximus, the logoi are preexistent in God. On the other, God called them to realization in concrete creation to show the continual presence of God and the Logos in Creation. One can assert, then, in an antinomial fashion, that the logoi are both transcendent to and immanent with the created world. As immanent, they manifest the divine intentions and principles of every single nature, that is, of every object, law, and intelligible image. They actually manifest the existential purpose of everything: "As realized in the existence of things, the materialize in the created order." One can say that the logoi are realized in the existence of things, but they are not themselves created or part of the created order; in other words, their "material" manifestations through sensible things and their intelligible images do not condition them from within the creation, for they are in themselves beyond the created, and the ground of their immanent manifestations is in the transcendent side of their rootedness in the divine Logos.
One observes here, however, a kind of dialectics that argues that the logoi, by having their source in the Logos of God, do not dissolve in this Logos--that is, their unity, being in Logos, does not eliminate their individuality. In other words, it is God-Logos who preserves the logoi in their unity; at the same time, the logoi are fixed in the Logos as they are, that is, they are in the unity, which is split in itself: "The logoi are thus not identical with the essence of God, nor with the empircal forms of existence of the things of the created world."
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See also "The Humankind Event and the Incarnation" (pages 226-236)...from there...
The human nature in Christ was operating within the reality of empirical space and historical time, whereas Christ's divine nature was always beyond the empirical and intelligible aeons, in the uncreated realm of the kingdom of God, which can be expressed symbolically in terms of the boundaries of the created if these boundaries are seen form the vertical (divine) dimension. It is from this "outside" that Christ the Logos of God coordinated the empirical space where he indwelled in the body with the rest of the created universe. This helps us to understand the space-time of the physical universe as the manifestation of the hypostatic mode of the relationship between God and the world.
One can rephase this idea by using a different analogy. Indeed, space and time are percieved by human beings from within creation. In this sense, one can speculate that this space-time is an internal form of the relation of the universe with the transcendent Divine. This internal form of space and time, being contingent and dependent on the interactions between the parts of the universe and being essential for the existence of human beings and their history, cannot be conceived, however, without its "external" counterpart, it's "boundary," which can be articulated only from "outside," from the perspective of the uncreated. This links empirical space and time with its moving "boundary" (which originates from the divine dimension), so that in no way are the space and time of the physical universe accomplished and fixed forever in the shapes that we can comprehend at present.
The question, then, is how the internal space-time of the universe is held in relation to the divine "environment" in which it is embedded, or, in other words, what is the principle of the borderline between the universe and its nonworldly ground associated with the external side of the space of the universe? Here, the analogy with the hypostatic union of two natures of Christ can be employed. Indeed, it is because of the hypostatic union of the divine and natural in Christ that one can argue by analogy that the interplay between the space and time of the universe and its uncreated ground in God is upheld also hypostatically by God in the course of God's economy of creation. The fulfillment of this economy took place in the incarnation of the Logos of God in flesh, which the link between the humanity of Christ (in space) and Christ's divinity as the Logos (which is beyond space but yet hold all space together) was established. This manifested that space and time are linked to the Divine. It is from this perspective that Torrance's assertions on the relational nature of space, as the form of rationality created by the Logos God to communicate his presence to us, receive further interpretation--namely, that the space and time of the universe manifest in natural (physical) terms the relation between the visible universe and it's "external" uncreated and divine "form," which constitutes the ground for the natural one. This implies that a particular appearance of space and time in the physical universe is not complete in itself and is open to the unfolding rationality of God, whose presence in the space and time of the universe has not an essential but a hypostatic character. Indeed, the very relation between the space and time of the universe and its uncreated ground is hypostatic; that is, it exists only in the hypostasis of the Logos God.
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.
"I love, therefore I am in I Am. God is my life." Post Edited (One Love) : 1/22/2009 12:07:09 PM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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| Posted 1/22/2009 1:12 PM (GMT -6) | | "The divine disposition 'diffuses itself' (Edwards) into a multiplicity of dispositions which "aim at" a unique actualization, a unique perspective on reality, which is defined either as an contribution to, and/or an experience of, beauty. It is at this point of this 'diffusion' that the distinction between God and the non-divine world occurs. The multiplicity of dispositions towards non-divine realities are themselves non-divine in their concrescence."
--Greg
"One can say that the logoi are realized in the existence of things, but they are not themselves created or part of the created order; in other words, their "material" manifestations through sensible things and their intelligible images do not condition them from within the creation, for they are in themselves beyond the created, and the ground of their immanent manifestations is in the transcendent side of their rootedness in the divine Logos."
--Alexei Nesteruk
Hmmmmm.....
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.
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Tom
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| Posted 1/22/2009 1:24 PM (GMT -6) | | | | |
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One Love
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| Posted 1/22/2009 1:50 PM (GMT -6) | | | How so? I'm interested.
Isn't it true that each of the "logoi" contain information about all other "logoi" in the Logos?
Isn't that just like holography?
I was just thinking about getting this before...now I'm definitely going to.
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.
"I love, therefore I am in I Am. God is my life." Post Edited (One Love) : 1/22/2009 12:56:42 PM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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| Posted 1/23/2009 7:08 AM (GMT -6) | | I just found this on YouTube haven't heard this since my early days as a newly saved/rededicated Christian in 1997. 
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.
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Tom
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| Posted 1/23/2009 8:08 AM (GMT -6) | | |
T: It looks rather UNLIKE a hologram.
D: How so? I'm interested. Isn't it true that each of the "logoi" contain information about all other "logoi" in the Logos?
T: Sure, all logoi are related in the Logos. That’s not the problem with the hologram analogy. The problem with the hologram analogy is that where hologram images are not self-determining, creation is. That's a fundamental difference. Everything about holograms is determined by the source. But as self-determining agents, we ARE sources ourselves (that’s all LFW can mean). We’re not JUST determined projections of a divine source.
D: The "Thought" of Creation in the Uncreated Creator's Mind?
T: Even if we go with an idealist metaphysic (and you know I like idealism), we HAVE to locate the point at which and how God "let’s go" of creation so that it (unlike a hologram) self-determines. THAT is the question. And I still haven't seen a way to make sense of "self-determining thoughts" (which is what we'd be if mentalism/idealism is true). Holograms? I don't see that it provides an analogy of that. Dreams? The objects and persons we dream about aren't self-determining. At best we can say, "Hey, we're like holograms (or dreams) EXCEPT for the fact that where the entities that constitute the content of these are not self-determining, WE ARE self-determining agents." But then you end up qualifying the analogy so fundamentally that it really doesn't apply.
Greg says “diffused,” but what’s that REALLY mean? Not even he knows. He borrowed it from Edwards. He's just posting THAT something like a "diffusion" (or my "letting go") takes place. Sure. We have to say that. But we don't know "how" it takes place. To me, the "diffusion" = a "letting go" which is itself the "endowing" of creation with self-determining freedom. And dude, THAT is really hard to pin down and say just what it is. I don’t think we CAN bore THAT deep into the mechanics of the ontological line separating God from creation, though we MUST say such a line exists.
Just thinking out loud.
Tom Post Edited (Tom) : 1/23/2009 9:52:37 AM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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| Posted 1/23/2009 1:20 PM (GMT -6) | | | Reposting from another page...
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| Posted By : Tom - 11/13/2007 2:52 AM |
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EPIK: What if human self-relational unities (human "selves") are ego peripheries within all humans (ego formation is part of human nature) that develop relationally with the divine self-relational unity, the Divine Ground/Center of Personhood, the Logos...which is ALSO within all humans?
Tom: I can live with that, yeah.
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EPIK (after Tom/Greg exchange): Tom, all we have to say is that the non-divine self-relational unities (non-divine "selves" ) are the emergent properties of the Self-Relational Logos formed from contingent relational matrices of God's Uncreated Energies which are in inseparable unity with, but not identical to, the Logos. You said before, Tom, that as long as the emergent property could be considered relatively autonomous from the Divine Disposition (where the "sin" of the human disposition could NOT BE DIRECTLY ATTRIBUTED to the Logos), you were cool, right? So, you should be cool with this.
Tom: I think so. (I said all that?)
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EPIK: Basically what I hear you saying here, Tom, is that you are willing to go with human self-relational unities being EMERGENT PROPERTIES of contingent relational matrices of God's Energies. Would I be right on that?
Tom: Yeah. But I prefer ‘emergent realities’, because we’re not just properties. The word “property” got carried over from the thing about Aristotle.
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| Posted By : One Love - 11/13/2007 5:40 AM |
Basically, what we are saying is that there is ONE TRUE PERSON (God) who is continually bestowing "personhood" upon our ego peripheries to the degrees that said ego peripheries epicletically indwell the True Person. Without the perichoretic indwelling of the Divine Center, a human individual is pretty much a rational, willing higher-order animal...but not a full human person. (If I'm not mistaken, SK said pretty much the same thing, right Corey and Selah? )
God is in the process of raising egoistic "animal humanity" to be a ego-transcending covenant community of full, authentic persons (Children of God) ! | |
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.
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One Love
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| Posted 1/23/2009 1:41 PM (GMT -6) | | Tom:
The problem with the hologram analogy is that where hologram images are not self-determining, creation is. That's a fundamental difference. Everything about holograms is determined by the source. But as self-determining agents, we ARE sources ourselves (that’s all LFW can mean). We’re not JUST determined projections of a divine source.
Let's say that Jesus (the Creator) is the Light of the World...and that "we" are bearers of that Light. The Light of Love...which requires Freedom.
Everything IS determined about us, insofar as we are "images of the Image". It is for FREEDOM that Christ has set us free.
Doesn't this work with the hologram idea?
“The free man is, if he is really free, freedom itself, yet only insofar as he is free.” --Meister Eckhart.
Our creaturely power of self-determination "images" that infinitely self-determinative power of God...even as it's ONLY SUSTAINED by God in us, as God works in us. (Do we really believe that Satan's self-determinative power lies in himself, and not in God?)
This is NOT the same thing as exhaustive determination, though. It is basically saying that if we are "bubbles of personhood", that God is the "liquid of personhood" within which (and by which) we are those "bubbles"
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.
"I love, therefore I am in I Am. God is my life." Post Edited (One Love) : 1/23/2009 1:00:21 PM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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Tom
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| Posted 1/23/2009 2:02 PM (GMT -6) | | D: Everything IS determined about us, insofar as we are "images of the Image".
T: If it's only "insofar as" we're images of Christ, then it's not "everything" about us that's determined. If we EVER determine ourselves libertarianly, then we're sufficiently different from being holograms (projected on the screen of God's mind).
Do holograms determine their own movements or not? Answer: No, they don't. Do we ever determine anything about selves? Yes, we do. That's a big enough difference to leave me wondering how we ARE like holograms.
I didn't think we were talking about 'personhood' per se though. We're talking about the material creation (rocks, trees, quantum particles, etc.) It's conceivable that all these things can simply be "thoughts" God is having. What I can't conceive if this is the case is that any of these thought things exercises self-determining freedom.
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One Love
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| Posted 1/23/2009 2:03 PM (GMT -6) | | Well, let's think about this. Aren't we (you and I, Tom) "thoughts God is having"? Right now?
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.
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One Love
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| Posted 1/23/2009 5:56 PM (GMT -6) | | | | |
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Tom
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| Posted 1/24/2009 3:18 AM (GMT -6) | | D: 1) In other words, you are having a hard time conceiving of a thought inhering in a Mind having the capacity to reflect on itself as being the “thought” of a Thinking Mind and relating to other “thoughts” in that Thinking Mind. Is this what you're saying?
Tom: It’s about freedom. Forgetting ‘what’ we are or whether what we are is analogous to a hologram or not, just focus on ‘how’ we are for the moment. Start with that. And ‘how’ we are is ‘free’ (at least in some respects). We self-determine. It’s THAT which I can’t conceive of in terms of our being mere ‘thoughts’ God is having.
It’s not about the whole being in every part, etc. I mean, yes, holograms exhibit THAT feature. But forget the unity/diversity and one/many debate for the moment. It’s about where to locate “the determining of” whatever free creaturely acts there in fact are. Since the projected images of holograms do not determine themselves in the least, it doesn’t provide an analogy of the God-world relationship. At best, there's an aspect of the world that's illustrated by holograms. But there are also essential aspects of the world that cannot be illustrated by holograms.
D: 2) I think we're forgetting something important here: God is the ultimate definer of all reality. God’s thoughts about reality ARE reality. You being a thought of God doesn’t make you unreal in any sense or merely an “abstraction.”
Tom: Hartshorne baby. Where a created reality acts freely, God’s knowledge of it is the ‘effect’ of that reality’s self-determining agency. God’s knowledge ‘corresponds to’ the reality known, not the other way around. True, we can reason back from what God believes/knows about the world to what the world is. That's because God is an infallible knower. In that sense God’s knowledge of free acts ‘defines’ those acts. But in that event it's not the case that what reality is (as known by God) is the ‘effect’ (the ‘definition’) of God’s apprehending act. That would make reality “correspond to God,” which (as Hartshorne argued in The Divine Relativity) is what grounds the determinism of Calvinism and even ultimately Thomism.
Hartshorne knew that once you posit freedom in creation, you change the direction of correspondence between God’s knowledge of the world and the actual world God knows and the latter determines the former. In creating a free world, God essentially opens himself up to be determined by creatures. I cause God to have a particular thought when I act freely (i.e., I decide what God's apprehensions of me are to be). So God’s knowledge of creaturely free acts is the result of those acts. God is affected by creation.
I'm rambling. Dude, you know all this. But this is why we are fundamentally unlike a hologram. Hologram images don’t/can’t determine themselves this way. They’re mere determinations of some other non-hologramic source.
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A month or so back I asked Greg about idealism; why I liked it and what my problems with it were. He won’t mind posting his response. Nothing incriminating! Ha.
Tom: I can’t see the distinction [with idealism] between ‘actuality’ and ‘possibility’ (or the abstract/concrete distinction) if all is reduced to being a ‘thought’ in God's mind. How’s God perceive the distinction between possible X and actual X if both are imagined by God. It seems to destroy this distinction.
Greg: It seems to me that the problem of maintaining the distinction between possible X and actual X if all is ultimately in the mind of God is simply the problem of maintaining quasi-autonomous self-determining free agents if all is ultimately the mind of God. The world with its “independent” agents begins to feel like a dream. This is why I’m not convinced idealism is the way to go.
And by the way, you don’t have to be an idealist to be a panpsychist.
Ciao,
TPost Edited (Tom) : 1/24/2009 3:25:43 AM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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