Stephen Hawking's new book, and the "separation of church and science"

It won't be the 'final' truth. That's the point. Like a rule that only works for positive numbers: it works and makes sense in certain settings, but another rule that is yet to be discovered may work more comprehensively.

So wisdom is objectivity? Lack of emotion? Complete detachment and only rationality? I thought last time we talked that I liked that but you didn't.

In the words of Atticus Finch, you have to climb into someone's skin and walk around in it. And the one time I've been called "wise" was when I was making statements explaining someone else's actions.

I know there's some rule that says the act of measuring something at a certain level alters the thing you're trying to measure. Is what you're saying like that?

So what's the difference between truth and Truth if "it" won't be the "final truth"?

Actually, I think I said "maybe passions." I absolutely do not think logic devoid of all emotion is wisdom - I think emotion is part of wisdom - but perhaps not SOME emotion in SOME amounts - e.g., lots of anger interferes with wisdom. But I think love or maybe compassion (better) is an integral part of wisdom. You've got to CARE to be wise.

Ask your physics teacher to explain the observer thing - something about how you measure something making the difference between whether it appears as a particle or a wave .... Tim??

I think 'care' is a good word in this instance. You have to comprehend the world, and you also have to care about it, and then you are wise. Wisdom is what makes a very intelligent human different from a robot that can perform all the same functions- there is no way for the robot to actually care about what it's doing.
Truth is what we strive for, and truth is what we attain (at least for now). To put it in math terms, the limit of "truth" as time approaches infinity is Truth.

Does that mean the last truth we have all accepted just before the universe expands into nothing is by definition Truth?

I think we asked the question somewhere in here, but I'm wondering if we ever decided what "I" is. It's been obsessing me. What is the I that has the experiences, emotions, thoughts, etc. Maybe I'm asking what "soul" is. Is it somehow a constant awareness? Or does it have some substance?

You say "it's been obsessing me". That person it's been obsessing... that's the "I".
I'm pretty sure it's a constant awareness... we're assuming souls exist in this conversation, correct?

And I don't like expanding into nothing- I like the circle idea. Truth is like an asymptote.

Also, my mom and I were talking about personalities. I said that your personality ("soul"?) is like a wire frame. All your experiences and actions are like clay that is built onto the frame. At first the clay covers the wire shape exactly, but as more clay gets put on the shape can change, and eventually the clay shape could be so different from the wire frame inside it that someone looking at it from the outside would not be able to tell what shape the frame was. The clay can be removed and reshaped, but the wire can't. The clay is not a personality, but the wire is.

Wow Emma, your metaphors can be pretty effective .... In psychology I think we assume that the clay is at least partly personality - that our personalities can be shaped by our experience. But maybe the wire could be the soul - also influencing the structure of the personality but unchanging if not always powerful or visible through the clay. Where does biology come in? Books I'm reading seem to define the soul as given by or part of the "one" or "source" or "ground" - what some might call God.

I also prefer the cyclical expanding and contracting - seems more intuitively likely to me too - but isn't the current wisdom simply for expansion?

So is the soul a constant awareness from a unique perspective given by or part of God/source/one/ground? And if the wire frame can't change then why are we here? I sometimes think it's to learn but what good would learning be for our soul if it can't change?

Let's say it's copper wire. God is a big hunk of copper in the center of the multiverse. The structure by which random bits of copper are formed into wire is the biology. The frame (which is made out of the wire) is the soul/personality (this is where our definitions diverge).

Hey, the current wisdom used to be that the world was on a turtle!! Current wisdom is called "current" because it doesn't stay in existence for very long.

We're here to become omniscient. Duh.
And to grow as a group (not as individuals)

How come we can't grow as individuals? How can we grow as a group without growing as individuals, and how can omniscience NOT change us?

So I thought we agreed that power can corrupt? Isn't that a reflection of a change in our personality? And if our personality can change and our soul can't then they can't be the same thing ...?

So is the survival of the soul/copper wire after death possible if its structure is its biology?

We do grow as individuals. Individuals grow by way of becoming more enlightened. Groups grow by way of actions resulting from the growth of individuals.

I think we already have the capacity for omniscience, and perhaps we already are omniscient but we have to grow as individuals in order to "unlock" what we already know. Maybe that's what 'intuition' is- glimpses of a Truth that we can't yet grok completely. (yes, I did just use "grok" in a sentence)

I changed my mind about the biology being the structure, btw: it's actually the color of the clay.

Power is a bowling ball which rams into the clay, creating a dent. It doesn't bend the wire though.
And no, our personality can't change. The way in which we express our personality changes based on experience.
Personality=Soul=Identity, and your identity can't change. Even if you get reincarnated or something, your identity can't change. You can't become another person.

So is it a mathematical kind of growth? If one individual "grows" and another "devolves" or something - is the net growth 0? Shouldn't an individual's growth count for something even if another goes backward?

So are you a believer in the whole Platonic remembering thing? That we knew/know it all and just have forgotten? And I've never heard grok before - does that mean I'm old?

I think biology makes a HUGE difference in our personality - I don't think clay color works because color is relatively inconsequential.

I agree that something can't change - isn't that your Sesame Street panic episode? But I think it would have to be some inner perspective or something - I'll have to think more about it - learning is a form of changing - I am somehow different after I have learned something - and I think your soul can learn. Hm. I don't agree that your personality can't change - how can you say that the way you express your personality changes but your personality doesn't - my personality IS the way I express myself - "longstanding patterns of thinking, emotion, and behavior" is something like how I think it is defined.

It dies count for something, but the net growth is still zero. It just means that the group is closer to their goal than they would have been if that person who grew hadn't grown.

You just don't grok the meaning of grok... That means you haven't read Stranger in a Strange Land. I thought you had though...
Not quite- I don't think we've forgotten anything. I just think that we're already at the level we are trying to get to, we just have to understand it (like how everybody is already a Buddha, they just don't know it yet.)

Biology has nothing to do with our personality!! It does have to do with the way we express it. Which is why it has to do with the clay, not the wire.

Maybe that's a different definition then...
But the way you express your personality CAN change without your personality changing. Let's say you don't want to be called weird (a personality trait). You start out trying to be normal, but it doesn't work, so you become a bully since you'd rather be "mean" than "weird". The meanness is the way you express your personality based on your experiences, but it has nothing to do with your actual personality. In reality you may be a very nice person who only acts mean to avoid being called weird.

I'll get to the soul stuff later...

But wait! If what I said is true, and we already know everything, then learning DOESN'T change us! Ha!

Grok sounded vaguely familiar - I did read it, I remember liking it, but it was so long ago ....

I'm not sure it's like the Buddha thing - I've always kind of thought that had something to do with acceptance of what is - and that that paradoxically promotes change because somehow we then let our true selves come out and accept that what we are and have been is what we somehow needed to be .... The concept of knowing it all seems final to me - more of an absolute unchanging awareness. This is hard.

If you're a nice person who acts mean aren't you still mean? Maybe we're ALL just nice, loving, etc. and our experience distorts us - but then our souls/personalities would be boring. Our biology seems related - e.g., it defines whether or not our moods are stable or rapidly changing - whether we have control over our impulses or not - whether we are smart (in the traditional sense) or not.

What if our soul is the longing/learning part? Then it would move us on, help us grow, but remain unchanging itself.

Oh, psh. I tell you what it's from, and THEN you recognize it

What's wrong with an absolute unchanging awareness? What we're aware of might change, but what's wrong with being aware to begin with? Maybe that's what sentience is, and when we 'grow' we're just becoming more able to be consciously aware of what we are already aware of subconsciously.

No, you're not mean just because you act mean!!!! A mean person acts that way because they enjoy seeing people suffer, and they enjoy it even more when people suffer at their hands. A nice person who acts mean could have a million different reasons for it, but none of those reasons would make the person mean.

But biology is physical! Assuming we are talking about souls, and that the definition of personality is the same as the definition of soul, then anything physical is negligible.

The longing/learning part of what? Isn't the soul the whole thing? Or are you saying that the soul causes the rest of us to change by causing us to actively seek after certain things (wisdom, knowledge, Snickers bars, etc.?)