What Created Us

Yes and that is the part I liked - well the no taking is going to be really hard. And I have to check with them about my daily meds. But since I am not crazy (a topic for another forum) I do not foresee any real problems except one.

Because I do live alone and have for almost 10 years I have a bad habit of talking to myself once in a while. So I will have to curb that but with some concentration and distraction I do not think that will be a problem.

As a Quaker I manage to get through meeting for worship in silence. And I attend other meetings and remain silent. After reading the program it seems I will be busy and my mind will be full so that the need to talk may fade.

Beside I liked the audio and the little film this seems like my cup of tea. Especially since the pain I have suffered for the last 17 - some of it all my life and I have never tried any alternative methods this might by a key to wellness for me.

Beside since you and JLN are the people I most admire because of you point of view about life I think I will be OK. If I am not they will let me know.

BTW I am not looking for a cure or anything just more and different ways to deal with the world. I will never be like I was and would not expect that buty I would like to move on down the road a little.

So God is made of material stuff? How could that stuff have come to exist in a far more organized fashion than the early universe?

In other words, God is magic. By definition, God is whatever you need him to be and is not subject to any physical laws, logic, or reason. How convenient.

But do you have any evidence that any such god exists outside of your own imagination?

Precepts and thoughts are ideas, of course, but I know many things by feeling them, not by thinking about them. Consider the warmth you feel on your skin when lying in the sun. Even without any concept of sun, skin, or heat energy, you "know" the difference between heat and cold.

When my beagle gets too hot lying in the sun, she gets up and moves to the shade under the maple tree. I doubt if she has ever really looked at the tree or has any idea about leaves blocking sunlight, skin absorbing photons and converting them to heat, or anything else. She just "knows" that if she moves, the uncomfortable feeling will stop. She does seem to understand words such as walk, sit, stay, bunny, dinner, bath, toy, and the names of people in the family, but I do not think she forms ideas about them. She just reacts to the feelings or learned responses associated with the words.

Ideas require some kind of representative thought such as a visual image or language with which quantify and communicate feelings/experiences. I do not think that babies have the capacity for ideas at birth, but as their brains develop they learn to associate words and concepts with their feelings and experiences. Some people do not think that consciousness is possible without language. I think that mammals, birds, and perhaps lower animals have an awareness of existence, but language is required to generate thoughts and ideas about our existence.

Old as I am, virtually all of the things I "know" without thought are overlaid with ideas about the world and how it works, memory associations, opinions, etc. But yes, to some extent I can suppress thinking and simply experience sensory perceptions without forming ideas about what I see. But when I turn my attention to a sound, I associate it with the idea of a bird, facts about birds, wondering if I should refill the bird feeder, buy birdseed, need other things from the store, mentally consult my schedule for the day …


An idea may seem to pop out of nothing, but generally results from stuff that has been percolating in your subconscious or is associated with some bit of sensory information that you may not even consciously perceive (music, smells, glimpsing someone who reminds you of someone with whom you associate that idea).

Do you honestly think that ideas magically appear without any prior cause? I suppose that if you deny the existence of a material reality as well as anyone who can generate ideas about it, that is the only logical conclusion. :wink:

IMO, the material cause of an idea is an experience, or the memory of one. If we had no experiences, we could have no ideas.

If there is no "I" there can be no subjective experience - only pointless data stored in a computer's memory, or a zombie's brain.

I do agree that "I" and ideas exist only when I am actively experiencing things. When my mind is unconscious or in deep sleep, there is no "I," no thoughts, no conscious experiences. However, memories of ideas are permanently stored in the neural connections of my brain, and can be called up whenever needed (well, it used to be that way. As I get older, the words and ideas I need are increasingly difficult to retrieve. )

JD and twyvel, after reading about the retreats, I would love to go on one. Unfortunately work and caring for elderly relatives preclude taking that much time for myself right now. But there is a chance that I will be laid off this summer, and if I can find someone to take care of my great-aunt and uncle, I will sign up for one.

Rosbourne, I'm not saying that I created everyone else's universe, just mine.

Terry, due to the fact that I don't understand any of what you're saying, I'm just going to consider you as the authority on everything and agree with what you said.

So in other words, you're a unique individual, just like everyone else

Hence the name.

Twyvel, I too am not sure about Kant's noumena. I know not of course what may be its composition or nature. Kant himself even supposed that it is unknowable; we can only know phenomena. It's just that I cannot be a complete idealist (that there are only ideas). It verges too closely on solipsism (to have equated all of Reality with MY mental life). Nevertheless, I feel that there is a Reality that preceded my existence as a ego-man; it is my reality and that of all others. What I make of it is construction, not given. It might even be (and I have little confidence in such squirts of insight I'm having now) that even ideas have the ontological status of noumena, and that our awareness of them makes them phenomena. Nah!
I do like what Terry has been saying, but it sounds too good to be true. S/he almost sounds like "one of us." And I like Individual's assertion that s/he makes noone's world but his/her own. That's a step away from solipsism, an acknowledgement of others' worlds. Nevetheless, Tywvel, I also believe that all is emptiness (in that it is processual not static) while at the same time form (we perceive process but can only conceive life in terms of constructed forms). I need some sleep.

Individual, do you suppose that everyone's individually-created universes have to be consistent with each other? Try thinking of me as the Powerball winner tonight. We'll see if my universe changes to correspond with yours.

Maybe you are God and if so you must be complete and therefore you cannot create anything!

JLN, I am a "she" and if non-dualism is reality, we are all "one of us," whether we know it or not. :wink:

But while I agree that "I" am a transient phenomena rather than a homunculus living in the brain, I do not think that we are all "one" in any real sense. Each brain generates a separate consciousness while it is alive and functioning, which permanently ceases to exist when the brain dies.

And I believe that the material universe I perceive really does exist independently of any consciousness that may or may not be aware of it, for two reasons:

1. The perceived universe reported by billions of human beings is amazingly consistent, which either reflects an underlying reality or a universe created by a single obsever.

2. I am quite sure that I did not create my world because I would not have done such a poor engineering job or created parasites, idiots, excessive testosterone, gods, and so much needless suffering.

Although you were just kidding, I am still going to address the point (and in doing so I will further define what I mean to both myself and you).

I believe that I created the universe because I am the only one that experiences it. This does not mean that I cannot change it, however it does mean that I can only do so by altering my perception of it.

If, for instance, I decide to hallucinate one day, then that hallucination would be indistinguishable from reality and a concrete experience of mine which. Therefore, that hallucination is, in fact, reality.

It is only by association with others who tell me that what I see is not real that I begin to believe so. But I could easily convince someone that glass is a liquid (which it is) and they would believe me despite the fact that they know it is a solid. Or I could convince someone that they see something that isn't really there. My point is that we can change our own universes, but we may not believe so because other people tell us that we didn't.

I just thought of some proof that we all create our own universes. Take synaesthetics for example, they can hear colors and see sounds much like what a person might experience when on LSD. Is there universe a false one simply because they don't react to it in the same way as everyone else? No, they have their own created universe.

We could also take this idea a step further. Since our id is separate from the egos, it is separate from what we define as our selves. And because we experience things through our id, our id must design the world that we perceive. Therefore, the gods that we seek are in our own heads.

Ms. Terry, I do not say that non-dualism IS reality; I say that we see our Reality more clearly when we do so non-dualistically.
Ultimately, all is one, a unity characterized by variety. You and I are one in our differences (including our distinct consciousness) and even in the space that connects us, though we think it separates us.
You see that the universe is distinct from any consciousness (of it). That's dualism. The consciousness in the universe is clearly a manifestation of the universe, not something outside of it and perceiving it. How horrible it must feel to see oneself as separate and surrounded by the universe. It includes me and it is on both sides of the telescope.
I don't think you've done a bad job of creating your universe; it's perfect because it is the only one there is for you.
I'm so glad you realize that "I" is not a homunculus in the brain (or mind), and that it is a coming and going experience-sensation, nothing else.
You present as evidence of the universe as objective because billions of people see it as the same (more or less). Some psychological anthropologists have considered this "consistency" problematical, arguing that culture is a way of masking or mediating perceptual differences. A.F.C.Wallace called the relevant cultural mechanisms "equivalency structures", permitting us to act AS IF we were completely sharing perceptions and conceptions. Let me ask you, even if we humans saw the universe the same, wouldn't that perhaps reflect an underlying species homogeneity rather than an "underlying reality"? Dogs, flies, and elephants are not likely to see the universe just as we do, because of their physiological differences.

Tywvel, I tend to think that you believe in "sheer non-existence" and that Kant's noumena is something like "sheer existence." Just a thought; no bets.

I'm new here. Hello everyone. I most of my time on the Internet, reading everything I can find about how the universe was created. If you search for that you will find (in my mind at least) two extremes. Those who think there is a god who has always been and created the heavens and the earth and everything in it during a week, around 4000 years ago. And those who think there is no god and that we and all of what we perceive are the result of an incredible twist of fate. I fall somewhere in the middle. I like to think that I am a scientific thinker, and working in engineering, I like to think that all this is the result of an incredibly complex and wonderful plan. The universe was "engineered", if you will, explicitly for us to exist in. It has become clear to the scientific community that a few percentage points change in any one of a pretty fair list of physical constants such as the mass of an electron, and life as we know it could not exist. In fact only in the rarest of scenarios, something as heavy or heavier than carbon could exist. That having been said, if you believe that the universe was engineered, you must explicitly believe in an engineer. I think it is entirely possible that there could be someone or something (no good choice of words here, I think) responsible for us being here. Of course you could also subscribe to the anthropological principle which basically says that there could be an infinite amount of alternate universes, and this universe and the physical constants exist precisely because it is conducive to our existence and that means we are here to wonder about it. I guess it's like the tree falling in the woods thing, if a universe is created out of the void, and there is no one around to wonder about how it got this way, does it really exist at all? The scientific side of my brain acknowledges the fact that given infinity as the bounds, anything no matter how infinity remote the possibility, has to happen at least exactly once. The spiritual side of my head (or my heart, as the ancients would have thought) likes to think there is a reason that we are here so I stay in the middle and hope we make it to find out. The more burning question in my mind is whether we will survive to find out. I read an interesting lecture by Hawking about why we are the way we are. In a nutshell, our social and scientific evolution has outstripped our genetic evolution thousands or even millions to one. We have developed technology to destroy ourselves thousands of times over. But deep in our genetic coding we are still driven by the urge to go to the neighboring tribe and kill all the men and steal the women and food so our tribe goes on and we have less competition for resources. At least in my world the worst scenario is all this really is an accident and there is no divine creator. In that case we owe it to ourselves to survive and eventually spread out over our galaxy and indeed the rest of the universe. I guess the best scenario would be there is a great engineer and we have ultimately as our purpose to master the universe, and who knows maybe even universe creation. An earlier post about doing a better job engineering the universe and the flaws of the people in it got me thinking. Wouldn't it be the ultimate revenge of a god to create a universe for each of us, throw us in the middle of it and say, "let's see you do better"?

Creating Universes where none where before is everyday occurences in M-theory. Doing one that can sustain life, and intelligent life at that is pretty amazing.

Having an unclear perception of time makes it hard to descirbe creation or talk authoratively about a creator.

But from a point of pure theoretical physics both the creation of our Universe from nothing and its development since the big bang can be modelled by scientists with a fairly high degree of fit of observations to theory.

You see nothing isn't quite what you think it is, in fact its probably very, very different. Nothing to a theoretical physicst is one of the most interesting things to study. I am talking of quantum foam, ultra small, ultra short lived, often defying the laws of our macro world because it exists for too brief a time for our laws to take hold.

The quantum foam entirely surrounds us and it is a mysterious region worth of considerable thought. If we ever get to the stars, I'd guess we do it by manipulating what we consider 3 dimensional space by interacting with quantum foam in some incredible way.

I appreciate that the question of this thread is WHAT created us, not WHO created us. Welcome Noholdsbarred. Interesting ideas.