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God has trouble with infinity
God is usually referred to in infinite terms. God is all-powerful, which can be interpreted as infinately powerful as no matter how much power he has you could always just postulate a little more. Infinity solves this problem. Infinity is cool like that but it does often create as many problems as it solves.
I was recently musing on the nature of time and the fact that time has a kind of scale that can be observed by the speed of perception of any given mind. For instance, a fly has a much faster perception speed than a human does. That is why they are so hard to hit with anything. From the fly's perspective, the rolled up newspaper that you are swatting with as fast as you can, seems to be moving very slowly. No matter how fast its perception speed though, the fly is still limited by its physical construction and the laws of physics. A human with the perception speed of a fly could not say change direction as fast a fly due to limitations in musculature and the drawbacks of vastly greater mass.
Time moves faster for the fly than it does for you, in the sense that if you were to start two timers on a swatting attempt, one counting at a rate based on the perception speed of the fly and one based on your preception speed, they would record very different amounts of time. This presumes that we would have a method of objectively determining perception speeds, of course. This is not to say that time is infact passing at different rates for you and the fly, it is only percieved to be doing so. Time can actually pass at different rates for two individuals but that requires outlandish relative speeds to accomplish. Relativity aside; the percpetion of the rate of time passing is very real for minds. If you were to encounter a being who percieved at a much slower rate than you, you would appear to be operating in fast forward from their point of view. If they were speaking to you, it would sound like it had been slowed down.
So what has all of this got to do with God?
Well, assuming God has a perception speed of infinity. You could phrase this as "God thinks infinity fast". If this were so, God could never percieve outside of a single moment. He would experience an infinity of time (from his point of view) in a picosecond. He could never percieve a second instant as he would have had to traverse an infinity of time in order to arrive there (perceptually speaking). Traversing an infinity is logically impossible.
So either God does not think infinitely fast, or he cannot logically exist(in the all-powerful sense). The interesting thing about infinity is that when you move down to any figure or amount or magnitude less than infinity, you are dropping down an infinity. In other words, if God does not think infinitely fast, then God thinks infinitely slower than the speed he might be concieved of thinking at. Take that Anselm! :P
I was recently musing on the nature of time and the fact that time has a kind of scale that can be observed by the speed of perception of any given mind. For instance, a fly has a much faster perception speed than a human does. That is why they are so hard to hit with anything. From the fly's perspective, the rolled up newspaper that you are swatting with as fast as you can, seems to be moving very slowly. No matter how fast its perception speed though, the fly is still limited by its physical construction and the laws of physics. A human with the perception speed of a fly could not say change direction as fast a fly due to limitations in musculature and the drawbacks of vastly greater mass.
Time moves faster for the fly than it does for you, in the sense that if you were to start two timers on a swatting attempt, one counting at a rate based on the perception speed of the fly and one based on your preception speed, they would record very different amounts of time. This presumes that we would have a method of objectively determining perception speeds, of course. This is not to say that time is infact passing at different rates for you and the fly, it is only percieved to be doing so. Time can actually pass at different rates for two individuals but that requires outlandish relative speeds to accomplish. Relativity aside; the percpetion of the rate of time passing is very real for minds. If you were to encounter a being who percieved at a much slower rate than you, you would appear to be operating in fast forward from their point of view. If they were speaking to you, it would sound like it had been slowed down.
So what has all of this got to do with God?
Well, assuming God has a perception speed of infinity. You could phrase this as "God thinks infinity fast". If this were so, God could never percieve outside of a single moment. He would experience an infinity of time (from his point of view) in a picosecond. He could never percieve a second instant as he would have had to traverse an infinity of time in order to arrive there (perceptually speaking). Traversing an infinity is logically impossible.
So either God does not think infinitely fast, or he cannot logically exist(in the all-powerful sense). The interesting thing about infinity is that when you move down to any figure or amount or magnitude less than infinity, you are dropping down an infinity. In other words, if God does not think infinitely fast, then God thinks infinitely slower than the speed he might be concieved of thinking at. Take that Anselm! :P
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by decodeq on -
Huh, fly is constrained by physical prison-implant-universe laws, as harmonic universe man does
But infinitizing is normal thing to do, it depends how and for what you practically use it
For example, infinitizing was used for splitter implant to lock people to physical universe and make them to make themselves and other inmates "dead forever" Human and fly are cross-copied and manifested by beings, applying infinity splitter with its limiting and constraining laws Unless that is dropped, human is limiting a fly, and fly is limiting human - they both are doing each other in
Infinity splitter stuff > http://jewel.moy.su/index/infinity_splitter/0-56
Interesting forum topics, thou
Regards,
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Permalink Reply by Stephen Moore on -
Gibberish in reply to gibberish. How appropriate.
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Permalink Reply by Gary Connolly on -
Decodeq, I must confess, I too think this is gibberish. :)
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Permalink Reply by Stephen Moore on
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I'm quite at a loss how to respond, but gibberish has that effect.
Upon what basis do you propose that a fly has a much faster perception speed of time? It seems to be based on nothing more than action-reaction. A fly reacts faster (generally speaking) than a human can act. Well, duh!
Perception of time (whatever that may mean) is irrelevant. A watched kettle boils just as fast an unwatched kettle even though the watched kettle seems to take longer, but this doesn't seem to be what you mean by "perception of time".
Given the premiss is nonsense, one need not address the latter implication with respect to God.
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Permalink Reply by Gary Connolly on
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Is it your usual habit to label anything you don't understand gibberish?
The idea that flies percieve things at a much faster rate than we do is well established. I am not going to do the leg work for you though. Try researching something before calling it gibberish.
Perception of time (whatever that may mean) is irrelevant.
You just called something, which you yourself indicated you don't understand, irrelevant.
When I am discussing the perception of time here, I am not referring to the altered experience that a human has of the rate at which time is passing. I am not talking about "Time flies when you are having fun" kind of thing. I am talking about the base rate at which human perception works, which is roughly constant. That rate is much slower than a flies perception. The reasons for that should be pretty obvious.
You might want to tone down the arrogant assumptions of nonsense when you clearly don't even know what is being presented.
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Permalink Reply by Jennifer Nicole on -
I understand what you mean, but probably because I was recently introduced to the idea in a Cracked article about why immortality would suck.
The longer we live, the faster time seems to go. A year was forever to a child's mind because they had only had a few years of life. But to a centurian, a year passes quickly. The longer you deal with time, the less time means in general to you. So yes, for someone who is eternal, the life of a human would be shorter than the time it takes for you to blink.
Since that fly only lives 24 hours as an adult, it's concept of time is based around its very short life. So its perception of time is delayed in comparison to ours.
It's a given that if there was an eternal god who ran all the universes in all the different dimensions, it would not care much about one tiny species that has only existed for a microsecond in comparison to that eternity, one tiny atom of area. But remember, with religion, it's ethnocentric. "I'm special and *I* matter."
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Permalink Reply by decodeq on
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Yeah, interesting post, however the topics "God has trouble with infinity" talks, actually, that being (as "godlike" for example) has trouble with infinity as infinity splitter implant, that sent him down through series of universes approx last 60-64 quadrilion years ago
Also that universe, to which that implant sent (prison-universe), is not much there anymore, because most are re-located to additional universes within it (ie "To Eternalize", To Enjoy", "To Survive" etc)
To Survive (only one will survive and the rest will sink into mud, to be the one who survives you must be superior to all others) is the "recent" universe disc, but in fact there are at least 10 of them
So, infinity implant, in short was ment for you do yourself in as "dead forever", but also to do thers in, as well
It is represented by infinite splitter universe machine, also by constant splitting into small tiny droplets (bubbles), which crystalize as programmed entities
"God has trouble with infinity" as splitter dead forever implant
To infinitize as such is normal ability and is not a trouble
But splitter implant is a trouble
Regards,
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Permalink Reply by Gary Connolly on
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Actually Jennifer, my argument is a little more basic than that. I am talking about the perception rates of species here rather than our changing views of how fast time passes. Perhaps the word perception is confusing because it could have dual meaning here. It is the only word that really applies to what I mean though so I think I am stuck with it. :P
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Permalink Reply by Gary Connolly on
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Thank you for that excellent contribution Kangaroo. The site in trouble? nah.
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