Is life and/or consciousness a fractal pattern?

[Shakuhachi]

How would you mathematically describe God?

 

[STT]

You cannot mathematically describe any entity who has free will.

 

[Rubee]

You cannot mathematically describe any entity who has free will.

THANK YOU!!! I wonder why this obvious truth is so hard to miss to be honest. Free will is the opposite of anything Math or any Laws of Logic can describe. And God is Absolute freedom.

Math implies things that are perfectly predetermined: Laws.That’s all it can describe.

 

[Rubee]

Personally, I think that STT is absolutely correct. Mathematics can’t be created. Because creation implies a conscious, coherent creator. And a conscious, coherent creator must be describable mathematically.

Consciousness requires coherence, and coherence requires order, and order is a property of mathematics.

Therefore mathematics must be a pre-existing property of any creator. and can’t be created by them.

I’m not a mathematician.

They cannot even describe LIFE (Mathematicians) and here you are suggesting that a Mathematical description of Absolute being, something no creature even comprehends, is possible.

Claiming you can describe God mathematically implies laws that God is constrained by, naturally, so you can perfectly describe or know them through logic. The only thing that “constrains” God is God. For God is the unconditioned. There are no God-transcending laws anywhere that Math can discover. So the closest to a mathematical description you can get of God is the basic Math formula which is still not a description of God. It’s a description of coherence or the law of non-contradiction. A=A. It’s just a way of saying, mathematically, God is himself. Or everything is itself. But it cannot say what “God” is. i.e. what “A” is. Only THAT he is himself.

I am willing to say flatly that claiming that God is mathematically describable must be a grave heresy of some kind. Probably we don’t have such a one, by a particular name, because no one has thought to deny the basic truth of God’s absolute incomprehensibility (i.e. indescribability!) to anything that is not God.

Do you know who can comprehend and describe God? We call him God the Word, the Logos. Or God, the Son. That’s why we believe in a thing called ‘revelation’.

“No one has seen the Father except the one who is from God; only he has seen the Father.”

St. John, 6:46.

Notice there are no Mathematicians, Logicians or Philosophers named anywhere there. Only the divine procession.

 

[Rubee]

Be my guest!

 

[Rubee]

So that God is not a becoming, as in some pantheistic systems, nor a being whose infinite potentiality is gradually unfolded or evolved. But He possesses at once all perfections. He is simultaneously all that He can be, infinitely real and infinitely perfect. What we conceive as His attributes or His operations, are really identical with His essence, and His essence includes essentially His existence. For all intelligences except His own, God is incomprehensible and indefinable. The nearest approach we can make to a definition is to call Him the Actus Purus . It is the name God gives to Himself: “I am who am”, i.e., I am the fullness of being and of perfection.

 

[Lucretius]

St. Thomas Aquinas understands the uniqueness of human (rational) thought to be something more like recursion, self-referencing. So, what makes humans different from other animals is that we can have thoughts about our own thoughts, and thoughts about those thoughts, and so forth. That is to say, we can reflect on our thoughts, compare them to the world, and discover whether these thoughts are true to the world, or not. We call thoughts that are true to reality truth, and those which aren’t false.

We do not have mere knowledge, which all conscious beings have, but knowledge of knowledge. Not merely conscious, but conscious of our own consciousness, conscious of that consciousness of our own consciousness, etc. It is this recursive consciousness that allows us to be aware of ourselves, the “I.”

We might say that our intelligence creates a microcosm of what is outside of us, inside of us, and we call this knowledge, with both of them being a fractal of one another.

 

[Rubee]

How do you come up with a mathematical description for what is “indefinable”?

 

[Beryllos]

Joining the conversation late.

Fractals have the same or similar form at all scales. Life and consciousness do not. Therefore fractals do not look like an appropriate model.

In my opinion, this is an overly enthusiastic application of fractals. It’s like when you have a new hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

 

[Rubee]

Mathematics is perfectly at home defining the indefinable.

Not meant as an insult to you personally, but you literally just said something can be done and not done at the same time. The law of noncontradiction forces me to notice the incoherence.

 

[Rubee]

You seem to be saying that conscious living beings possess no similarities? But the very fact that they’re conscious and living implies that they do indeed have similarities. Isn’t life, in all of its various forms, still life?

I will just quote myself from earlier:

“So the closest to a mathematical description you can get of God is the basic Math formula which is still not a description of God. It’s a description of coherence or the law of non-contradiction. A=A. It’s just a way of saying, mathematically, God is himself. Or everything is itself. But it cannot say what “God” is. i.e. what “A” is. Only THAT he is himself.”

Math can say THAT Life is Life, but Math still cannot say what “Life” is.

Just because we may fail to recognize nature’s patterns, doesn’t mean that they’re not there. Even you believe that you’re made in God’s image.

Same thing as above.

 

[Rubee]

Technically, math can’t define what anything is. Not you, or me, or figgy pudding.

Well thanks! It took a few weeks but you finally got here. Glad we can finally put this behind us now.

 

[Aloysium]

math both can, and can’t define something

something = x

“Something”, which exists as itself, beyond or transcendent to what we experience through the senses, can be pointed to by that definition, which describes some aspect of its structure, the relationship it has with other elements of the system within which it exists, for example representing the mass of a particular planet in the universe.

It would seem that the only thing that is the same as its definition would be mathematics and geometry. Maybe the word “word”.

 

[Rubee]

Well, since I’m undefinable, that must make me God.

An argument that no one made. If you’re going to donate me arguments, at least give me some I would actually make.

And no, you’re not undefinable, sorry to break it to you.

Here’s the sentence your little strawman are trying to butcher so unsuccessfully:

For all intelligences except His own, God is incomprehensible and indefinable.

Now as to the actual arguments I have made on this thread, Math cannot describe all reality.

Things claimed to be indescribable by math in this very thread by myself:

1. Being
2. Life
3. Freedom
4. Consciousness
5. God.

Nowhere shall you find a claim that only God is not describable by Math.

I’m sorry you wasted so much time thinking such a ridiculous thing like indescribability by Math = indefinability by anything less than God. I’m sorrier you spent so much effort refuting a phantom. And I’m very glad, again, that you now admit the obvious readily: Not everything is describable by Math, least of all the unconditioned reality we call God.

 

[Rubee]

Sorry, to disappoint you but yes I am.

Aloysium, is on the right track, we can define things in a couple of ways, with words, and with math. And it’s true, you can define me with words, but then again people define God with words too. They do it all the time. Now you may claim that these words don’t convey the fullness of what something is, and that’s true. But it’s true both for God and for me. So anything is definable by words…to a point…just as anything is definable by math…to a point.

But what’s that point? In words you might consider it to be the point where something can be defined simply as existence itself…Actus Purus. Not divisible into any constituent parts. It’s being itself. No definition beyond that is possible.

You are not undefinable. You have an essence that is a clear, finite boundary to your being. Again, lets not skirt around the actual context in which the word “definable” entered this discussion:

For all intelligences except His own, God is incomprehensible and indefinable.

Yeah, you are most certainly not this^. And so no. Definitely definable.

They exist, but they have indefinite properties. You, me, and figgy pudding can all be mathematically defined by our properties…to a point.

I don’t know how often I’m expected to thank you but thank u again 4 admitting the argument. Literally this is the claim I made: repeatedly. That there is reality Math cannot define and not just Math but I included words and logic too. So it seems to me you came in, did not get the point being made and then proceeded to make unnecessary arguments denying that there is in fact reality that cannot be modelled by Math. You literally claimed “everything can be modelled by Math”, repeatedly.

What you are now distinguishing between “definite properties” and “indefinite” has actually been made a few times above. In fact, I’ll just go ahead and quote one of those posts from earlier:

And I don’t know how order operates when it comes to the nature of our being. I mean:
-There must be some order since we are not God. Is it representable by math on some level? I don’t know.
-But there is also freedom. Can you really represent freedom or even being as being mathematically?

X=X doesn’t represents being as being, it seems. In other words, the unconditioned reality that is God…is it really mathematically describable? I highly doubt it.

We are an essence and existence (creatures) and I think that our essence makes us mathematically describable (possibly) but I doubt our existence is mathematically describable.

This was days ago and is just one of the posts in which the idea of “some description” that did not include what these realities are was expressed. It was repeated several other times.

So no. I will not accept a lecture that is nothing but now finally admitting the obvious.

 

[Elf01]

The point of these posts wasn’t to convince you of anything. I knew going in that that was impossible. You’re a Catholic after all, you’re not supposed to be open-minded. The hope was that someone else will see what you can’t.

Why are you on a forum where the majority of us are Catholic then?

 

[Rubee]

LOL. And you’re doing what I didn’t expect: Stooping low.

You did exactly what I expected you to do, you didn’t listen. But somewhere out there, there’s someone who will. They’ll listen, and they’ll think. And for a Catholic, thinking is a very dangerous thing to do.

This is pathetic.

You made ridiculous claims, SEVERAL TIMES, clearly not understanding what you sought to refute and now you think adhominems and insulting Catholicism on a Catholic forum gives you a high road.

Next time, maybe try listening yourself.

Two other very early posts, for those “open-minded others” you want to read this thread:

@RealisticCatholic , I am just wondering if math/logic can describe all realities; including life; freedom and Divinity. In other words, do you not see the difference between saying God creates through an act of his arbitrary will/freedom and saying he is creator by nature ? Claiming that Mathematics can describe/model all of reality without exception, seems to me to be speaking of this latter God. Spinoza’s God, perhaps, might be that; but I don’t see how a free act, like the act of creation, can be modelled on laws and principles that would then be describable in Mathematics. Not to mention an unconditioned reality.

Ok, thank you @tafan2! I did not know that. The pple I’ve been talking to seem to think everything is a fractal. So I granted it (I know nothing about Math) but made an exception for realities that seem to me things that don’t lend themselves easily to mathematical descriptions, like life itself, consciousness, will/freedom, Godhood.

 

[Rubee]

I’m very happy, thank you for the kind wishes. Not because I’ve “won”. Still, I have no idea what my happiness, how open-minded you think I am or how unthinking you think Catholics are have to do with this discussion.

 

[Rubee]

@lisaandlena I realize my tone in this thread in several places was uncharitable and lacked humility and probably altered the progression of the discussion. It was unnecessary and I apologize. While there may have been a misunderstanding of each other’s points, I recognize it was not just one way. I too misconstrued most of your intended meaning when you suggested “everything” being modelled. I again apologize.

 

[Rubee]

I haven’t received any wrath from anyone (and I did not report you if that’s what you think). I’m sorry you were suspended because of our debate and whatever small part I may have had in driving you to the point of saying the things that got you the suspension, which I suspect is the comments on Catholicism.

In any case, the apology is offered sincerely, and the goal is to honour charity and humility, (i.e the Holy Spirit), not CAF moderators.

Best of luck.