Women do work shit jobs anyway, they just happen to be different than the kinds of shit jobs that men work.

Hey, it's a big world, you're entitled to believe what you like, just like everyone else! Cheers.

I'll borrow your format.. out of temporal sequential order. (dry j/k)

>Not really, the rebuttal is "the term creation is undefined in the domain of the hypothetical god", "who created god" does not make sense. We can only define god, by exclusion. By attributing any property to the concept we already stepped out of the domain of logic.

Hmm... well my difficulty with that is that creation means that the universe above exists in a nested state in relation to God. Nesting and being nested is a property that is attributable to both God and universe, and it implies neither space nor time. An existential value is also very definitely a property. Defining existence by negation/exclusion.. I'll think on that.

>Anyway you derived an argument from an example, the argument in your opinion would be "if the universe is an abstraction itself...". And that is indeed an assumption, a supposition.

Perhaps, my argument would be 'if the universe is a simulation then forms of existence that -think they exist- are capable of being simulated. How does one place limits on it, address what existence even is, because if you can't ultimately define what it is, you can't define what it is not, either? How do you then arrive at that negation leading to what God is? If existence is capable of being simulated, for example, Descartes' dream argument where reality is ultimately unknowable, except that now Descartes' reply itself is called into question if a being may be real or simulated, does the simulation think it thinks or does it actually think? With all odds being equal what does this imply universally?' One can provide an example amongst endless examples, without any yardstick for measuring success. Is there such a yardstick?

There were very little ground rules layed down in the intro posts in this thread.. And hence this exchange clarifies things because now there are less assumptions or suppositions to go around as there were ten posts up. Implication however =/= supposition rather it may indicate presupposition. Which is fine, everything presupposes something else, which is partially why one analyses implications.

>If I had an argument it would rather be something like "the way the universe is formed might be in the future discovered as one without external intervention, beyond all doubts, and logically proven as the only possible one, or even proven as the only conceivable one. But that's empty circular reasoning, because the proofs have modeled the universe in terms of concepts which we have derived from our understanding of it. So all we have proved is that the universe is a closed system"

Yes I completely agree in that nobody is going to ever have the ultimate answer, because such is beyond the capability of empiricism.. the age old problem is how one can arrive at any knowledge of what possibly exists outside that knowledge through reason and observation.. I wonder about the Wittgenstein quote 'what we cannot speak of, we must pass over in silence' ..which doesn't mean the effort isn't worthwhile, after all, I doubt we'll ever run out of things to learn about

>But that's outside the topic.

Hmm, this might be the root of our discussion. Can one by a process of negation from what exists arrive at what doesn't, from 'the inside'?

>More than a convenience, it follows from being the creator: the time of an abstraction is never the same time of the plane where the abstraction is thought up in our universe, after all.

>Time, in a game of life can be defined as the discrete sequence of generations. How long it take to compute them is not relevant to the abstraction.
Time in a game of chess can be defined as the sequence of moves: even if the rules refer to timeouts, time annotations are just metadata.

>The fact that creation IN OUR UNIVERSE is impossible without unidirectional time is just a proof of the link between the concept "creation" and "time" in our universe, so that any attempt of redefining it in the dimension of a hypothetical god must define the equivalent of an unidirectional time axis in which he operates. Of course such definitions are equivalent to all the assertions made about objects outside this universe AKA religions.

Not necessarily, God is antecedent to time by our temporal standards if God creates what we think of as time. God still is responsible for its being, why otherwise say god 'creates' the universe? I see you wish to define God as existing outside of a unidirectional time axis but with the example I'm unsure. I have plenty of data files on my hard drive that contain sequences of moving images existing all at once, arrays and data matrices can store temporal data as well, and there's only one reason a sequence of states should be 'successive'. Outside the 'game'.. humans just so happen to experience time in the direction of increasing entropy, for whatever reason. Calculations of such events also occur in the direction of increasing entropy.

What I'm getting at is that I have an image from your analogy as God being like a programmer looking at a data file that contains all the temporal data as an abstraction.. hence what did you say.. 'the act of creating the universe coincides with knowing everything about it'.. except this occurs whether or not 'the guy' is bound by time. But that temporal data exists only by virtue of the conditions of the programmer's very existence in the first place: it is computed sequentially in that universe to begin with, which implies creator time, and secondly, perception of time as a sequential thing. I see you reaching (not in a bad way at all) with the idea of time as a data abstraction that can be represented spatially or via information, but I don't think the analogy is close enough to a God that exists independent of time yet in a relationship with it.

Second, once again the issue here is speaking about the substance of reality (say your simulated universe) as opposed to the conditions that make it possible for reality (the simulation) to exist, and how does one account for God in that relationship. The world's religions disagree quite a lot about God and whether or not concepts of God are restricted to certain conditions of existence to begin with. Nobody seems to even agree.. is God 'bound' to create the best of all possible worlds or not..? If 'creation' as we think of it doesn't exist in God's reality then why say God created the universe? God has to make existence possible before putting things in it (if God even does that).. God has to define time itself unless God is bound by time, or e.g. the a priori condition that time is the best arrangement of things, and God must do things the 'best way' etc. And a relationship between creator and creation doesn't necessarily imply time, or limits to that relationship or other relationships.

>This is why I prefer staying in the universe and talk about abstractions we create, instead of the hypothetical domain in respect to which we are the abstraction.

Well, the hypothetical domain and what exists in it is already being defined.

>Well, it is yours, you called it an ontological argument. To me it is an example that proves the OP claim as inconclusive.

The example kind of does utilize the ontological argument not just in conceiving God a priori but God as the 'first cause' in which God also exists outside of what humans call time.

So God creates the game of life. God has the convenience of being free of time. Time itself is, by simple subtraction from the argument, irrelevant to creation, as God's act of creation is not bound by time. Time only operates within the simulation itself, and God does not create the existence of the -simulation itself- from -inside the simulation- anymore than the programmer creates the computer running -conway's game of life- from inside the simulation of conway's game of life. Time is irrelevant to the status of something as created. (As I understand it, the universe and time itself may be a projection by some models).

The presupposition however in the "who created god" rebuttal above is 'creation requires an antecedent'. However claiming that creation implies an antecedent makes no sense if God is 'free' from time. It is therefore self-contradictory and we exclude it and move on.. to your ontological argument. To get there the first implication: immediately 'infinite assumptions' requiring a 'unidirectional time axis' is not a rebuttal--if creation doesn't rely on time, neither does existence.

To be free of assumptions one must concede of every possibility all at once for or against, whether it be singular or infinite--and the outside of the simulation remains the infinite possibilities of the unknown. Now of course old-skool rationalism and the argument from ontology says 'Hey there, I've an answer to that... if humans can conceive of perfection, surely it must exist" which brings us to the analogy:

A "prime number" is a mathematical proposition that is agreed upon. Since God as a metaphysical Western construct is not a definition that all agree on even within Western metaphysics, what falls outside of it is open to debate and cannot be presupposed.

Let's assume we sit down and agree on a definition of God. Say we perhaps decide that God is a label we'll use to contain ALL those infinite possibilities of the unknown. That's about as close as we can get.

Your argument makes an example of a universe where your definition of God is possible and if you read carefully you will see that never did I contest the analogy itself, I demonstrate that it exists in an infinite sea of possibilities. Let's wind it back to another one of your analogies..

"I've a hundred dollars. What should I buy? This pair of shoes costs one hundred dollars. Because of that, I can buy shoes. Yes, I will buy shoes."

"You decided so quickly! You can buy a lot more things than shoes if you wish."

"Like what?"

The moral of the story being, other possibilities have nothing to do with inventing assumptions out of thin air. They are quite simply, either accounted for, or not. I can declare there's only one way to go to the store on the other side of the city, I can draw a map to get there, call that the model, the 'definition', and when others find fifty other routes, I can say they're just 'making assumptions' because they aren't following my map. Rather than say, building on what's there from other perspectives. Fortunately for the most part, philosophy does the latter.

They are different things: stochastic processes are probabilistic, so yes, random, but not without limits rather applied in specific frameworks.. relevance: In a simulation, were one to model artificial intelligence, one could apply stochastic processes (eg stochastic neural networks).

Indeterminacy can also mean incompleteness or 'unknown' (aka an indeterminate model is one where some thing remain unknown, therefore the model is.. duh, indeterminate). I am therefore making it clear that a simulation need not be deterministic, but by indeterminate and random I mean organized stochastic processes.

The other reason I brought up indeterminacy was the classic 'free will problem' that says that if the universe is determinate, there is no such thing as free will, because you can predict everything in advance. If a simulation is determinate, there can be no free will in the simulation. So I bring up 'indeterminacy' not just in the above context, but also to indicate that the simulation can be all those things, and we still have a free will problem. Lastly the 'being' in the simulation does not know whether or not he is in a simulation. In a roundabout way the poster a step up from the one I am responding to almost brings up Descartes' dream argument... sans the cogito ergo sum, of course the simulation throws the whole cogito ergo sum in doubt anyway, perhaps... but I digress.

Anyway I don't assume that the other poster knows what the word stochastic means either (you yourself think it just means 'random'), so between using those three descriptors, maybe something will be communicated, assuming the other poster isn't looking for quick and easy ways to be snide aka 'did you think it would be more convincing?'

Ironically the only person here who keeps bringing up the word 'proof' is you, as well as initiating the use of the word 'disprove' because of course, disproving is completely different from proving.

A counterexample points out implications in a previous argument and it is not exempt from being or having a premise. An argument has premises and a conclusion and therefore implications, otherwise you are communicating nothing. "Conway's game of life creatures became sentient." is a premise. "The universe is a simulation" is a stated premise with implications. It is still an argument with a premise and a conclusion, which you illustrate above. It is not magically exempt from relying on inherent assumptions more than any other form of human communication. If you think you are immune from assumptions, while others are making 'infinite assumptions' when they provide a counterexample, then we are at an impasse, because that is called 'typing left-handed'. And at that point continuing forward is 'beating' a dead horse, while typing left handed. Grandiose droning about 'believers' vs 'atheists' (which also contain assumptions and dichotomies) also fit nicely into that category.

There's nothing wrong with typing left handed of course, other than that it is boring to watch. And not knowing some of the better religious philosophers from the last century who understand these problems better indicates that it's time to move on, watching dead horses getting beaten isn't my thing.

There's no alternate scenario disproving anything because nothing falsifiable or assumable has been given other than a premise (eg: a simulated universe) with only the implications that make you happy cherry picked out, the rest excluded. The other assumption is as to what you think this person believes.

In your own words "If you make implementation details about the initial condition of an universe proof that such an universe has no superior level.." and then you decide to break this rule as soon as it suits your fantasies. I was hoping for consistency--thank you for wasting my time with gobbledeygook and a genuinely terrible analogy that would have much better religious philosophers like Whitehead and Copleston hanging their heads in shame. At least Copleston attempted to defend the ontological argument on rational grounds rather than ludicrously comparing it to wanting to buy a more expensive meal at a restaurant.

The atheist is pointing out that there are plenty of assumptions happening either way. You can't auto-magically assume that if one can exist in a simulation, the simulation stops where you want it to either. There's no basis to assume anything.

Sounds to me like this is just recreating the ontological argument with a guy outside a simulation in place of a first cause, and well, I don't accept the ontological argument as vaild either.

A simulation can employ stochastic, random, indeterminate processes, it doesn't have to be deterministic. However, indeterminate, random processes hardly equate with free will either. Actually, I think the simulation argument is far more effective for questioning concepts of free will than it is a metaphor or proof of god. (Especially when it is liable to infinite recursion, simulation within simulation, who really is god, is 'god' inside a simulation and bound to its rules?).

That's assuming he's not in a simulation himself. How does he know he's not?

If we can be living in a simulation then there's no reason a supposed god can't be in a simulation either, with no basis for knowing where 'reality' begins. It's still turtles all the way down with the simulation argument.

Actually this seems somewhat reminiscent of the ontological argument but with a 20th century vibe.

I guess denial is an easy way to derail things.

I wrote a short science fiction story once. In the Renaissance, you could be a polymath by age 30, because there wasn't nearly as much information to learn as there is now. Discovering paradigm-shifting physical laws of friction or gravity or planetary motion is far more obvious than say, specializing your career in the behavior of certain genes, which nowadays can take up until your mid-thirties to acquire competency in.

Story premise: in order to contribute to a scientific field, you have to know the relevant research. In the far future, humans have amassed so much information that for a newcomer to even catch up to all the latest relevant information in a field starts taking upwards of forty to fifty years, by which time the scientist is well, past her prime. In other words, we discover there's not only say energy/computing limitations but hard neurological and biological roadblocks to our scientific progress (and we have to find ways to work around it).

I haven't come up with an ending.

Yes. Same goes for modeling the properties of 'nothing'.

The claim in the headline is phrased that way presumably because it is attention-seeking 'scientific journalism' (web hits are good).

Ok, so we've moved the goalpost from *women can't perform as well as men at math* at least to *women can, but only men have that wider range that leads to true exceptional genius*.. that's a start...

Which is an interesting proposition with a very short historical sample size to draw from, given that up until the mid 20th century it was difficult for women to enter the sciences. And even in time periods when women were discouraged from doing so we still find women who are exceptional such as Emmy Noether. Computer science is also interesting given that women were quite active in the early days, and we've Grace Hopper responsible for developing the first compiler.

I think it ironic to mention 'not admitting sex-based difference' when at best sex-based difference in studies gives us -overlapping distributions- not -separate tidy boxes- and really only for certain kinds of thinking that are difficult to disentangle from nurture/environment. Neuroscientists have only begun to map the human brain, and both men and women are affected by hormones with conflicting studies saying what hormone does what. There is little clear evidence as to what sex-based biological capabilities/differences actually are and they don't affect math skills in tests accounting for cultural bias. Second, perhaps that one in a few thousand men had the qualities of 'future leaders' speaks volumes about traditional thinking, presupposing that only certain men with certain fetishized qualities are chosen as leaders based on old paradigms. There is certainly no historical basis for such a claim given that even despite the limits placed on women throughout history you still find women breaking the rules taking leadership positions, sneaking into battles, writing novels under pseudonyms, being renowned as philosophers and mathematicians, being fully capable of insanity, capable of a lot of things, really, rather. Oh, and being ignored from history due to plenty of men who think women belong in the home (see balzac).

It all comes down once again to turning descriptive statements into prescriptive roles. For example, confusing descriptions of cultural habits with biological differences, and then making prescriptive statements about gender based on that combo.

We are capable of dealing with suicide, homeless men, autism (whatever autism turns out to be) AND sexism. We are also capable of dealing with viral epidemics, PTSD in soldiers, so forth, AND sexism. Humans are capable of separating different problems into different boxes and tackling them. There's no need to conflate separate problems.