>... yet "religion" isn't symbolic realism, it's rather symbolic (mythic) authority figures, allegories at best, starting with the "Big Guy" upstairs, and by extension his Earthly representatives, with the guy who's "death and rebirth" is central to his character leading the Earthly contingent of rulers. This sort of "authority-figure" based reasoning isn't a description of God, it's rather the playbook of Satan or Mara (or AI) for controlling their hoodwinked minions (allegorically speaking of course). We're truly getting on to the more sophisticated ontological questions here, but I may not have communicated clearly what I meant by symbolic realism. A symbol is, in truth, a signifier - Everything in reality could be explained as semiosis; it would seem that even CTMU agrees on this point - which allows a conscious observer of something to transcend what is accessible in the thing itself (or to go beyond). It is heavily related to analogy making, which we find becomes an authentic necessity when it comes to any discussion of the one, true God. Even the language of CTMU at this level is, at best, a form of analogy. The Greeks had an interesting take on the term symbol, which was something like 'a meeting place between two things', combined with the notion that the symbol is the 'outward sign' of the thing with which it converges. Importantly, the symbol itself is not supposed to be a mere mark or trifle. In the deepest sense, the symbol is *real*. These images that mankind experiences with respect to their internal intellection of God are imperfect analogies based on our being 'empty vessels' which receive a collective unconscious 'light' or epistema that reify certain pure qualities of God. We see this in both the Kabbalah and in Christianity (truly, in all religions). Christians experience God as a father, and their images tend to converge on a cluster of qualities which reflect this, not the least of which includes and aged man with a beard (a symbolic complex upon which many peoples have converged to represent the timeless father, or the god of time itself). If we take the CTMU seriously, and specifically its reflexive self-simulating nature (combined with our ability to transition between this terminology and a Platonic kind of emanationist cosmology), we could think that God is simulating itself, and our phenomenal experience of God is that simulation. We can't know God perfectly (in fact, I believe true knowledge of something is equivalent to ontological identity), but neither can we know any human mind perfectly. We are a consciousness that perceive signs and feeds back symbol onto these signs to create our reality. God is not the 'old man in the sky', but neither is he *not* that. They're simultaneously true, because if the former is true, then so must be the latter. I'm loathe to trivialize our symbols because I believe they have deep, deep reality. >The problem with the latter UBT-description is it can't make sense by any demonstration, except perhaps by extended "symbolic realism" offered by the CTMU, which is a tall order for us sub-200 IQ peasants. That's an interesting observation in light of my above comments. IQ basically corresponds with a power to abstract, which is to say a power to distill accurate and intelligible models from intractable complexity. Someone with a massive IQ is likely to see a system like the universe in more and more symbolic terms (often expressed by the 'pure science' of mathematics, although this deprives the universe of the equally important *qualities* of existence, in exclusive partiality to *quantity*). This is a process we equate with high-powered pure reasoning. I highlighted the parallels between Langan's model and the metaphysics of Aquinas/Aristotle, because these people are all effectively doing the same thing: finding the most primitive and naked pattern that accurately describes reality. I doubt we'd be surprised to find that Aquinas and Aristotle both had very high IQs. >Only terms like unboundedness, which is nothingness, which is pure freedom, which (in physical terms) is a primordial infinite mass (immovable object), can suffice to describe what "God" must be in the global sense, and the term UBT works even better This works together with what I have been saying so far. Ultimately, in the attempt to strip the intellection of God to its greatest nakedness (relying on the simplest conceptual additions), we always arrive at some kind of cluster of attributes, and eventually (if we're really insightful): a fundamental *duality* which is intellectually impassable. Good - Evil. Unstoppable - Immovable. Everything - Nothing. Private - Public, or Concealed - Revealed. This is something I was attempting to get across with the notion of 'symbolic realism'. Sure, these things are analogy, but they reflect a certain kind of gnosis, perhaps the fullest knowledge that we can have that is articulable - the rest is an ineffable feeling state. Even Langan's model relies on just such analogies, but he couches his vocabulary in contemporary computational terms - in one sense 'modernizing' ideas that have been with us for quite some time, not just on the occidental tradition, but in eastern traditions like Buddhism and Hinduism and Taoism. I think @PS has called the abstraction that refers to this entire 'collective wisdom tradition' as *Philosohia perennis*. We have our various systems of symbols we use to best represent what is an ineffable internal gnosis that can *only degrade in its truth* by becoming language and picture. This establishes a spectrum, however, across which we can judge different religious symbolic systems according to the quality of their metaphysics/theology. It could perhaps be the case that some *unique* element of Truth is captured by *each* system in a way which is not repeatable by any other system, making all of them a gift in some regard. But we'd also think that there is one 'best' system which is closest to universal truth. CTMU, for example, strikes me as having a great deal of worth by virtue of acting like a clear bridge between metaphysical/value-based/qualitative descriptions of reality (Aquinas-Aristotle) and the language of modern physics (mathematical, physical, computational). For the modern mind to which the antiquated language speaks less effectively, a theory like CTMU works nicely to convince today's skeptic that God is not simply compatible with the physical descriptions of the universe, He is expected. >But given that we know life and consciousness exist, then it stands to reason that the means of "self realization" available to UBT (God) is beyond "just" mere topological self containment, but includes self realization in the sense pertaining to and thereby necessitating life and conscious as we know it. The entire paragraph which precedes this is very good. I'd just say that my own particular way of viewing reality would be as a mind. I think the panentheists like Eckhart and some of the neo-Platonists were getting close when they said that man (and corporeal reality) were the image of an image in the mind of God. What Langan has described is probably the closest *verbal* description of what it is to simply *be a mind* that it is possible to accomplish. The internally-directed conspansion of space and timescales is impossible for me to *directly* link to thought itself, but intuitively, something about this description *just is* what I take thought itself to be, for example when I am creating a fictional world in my own mind - it's not as though space-time in that world of thought is expanding. Rather, I might think that in their noumenous sense, thoughts are conspanding infinitely inward. My mental map is not limited by time, nor space, and so is dimensionless except to the extent which I give it dimension in projection, but not *real* extension. --- >Neither Chris nor Russell seem to mention the obvious "hiding place" where "unreality" is constricted by "this ... reality", namely "empty space", which is simply the unused potential or "path not taken" by any conspanding operator, up to and including the G.O.D. operator. So here comes another troubling ontological question. Does this mean you hold a belief in some kind 'aether' theory, in which what we take to be empty space is actually some kind of vital, dynamic substance? I understand that you take the UBT to be transcendental, but you must take our contemporary substance space-time to be some kind of reified form of this, a distillation, or image of this more ineffable ultimate reality? I know that the electric universe theory, for example, also takes after Tesla and some other thinkers of his era in the belief that empty space is truly an active substance. I suppose my question would be, if not, what are we to think about space? Certainly it has the *apparent* quality of extension, but I'm prone to a kind of *idealism*, in which the mind itself constructs experience/perception on the basis of a Kantian-esque set of categories. But I'm also skeptical of pure idealism, and I'm not sure if CTMU does, in fact, promote a *pure* idealism or not. Again, this entire distinction between subject-object (i.e. I am a thing that perceives space) could fundamentally be an illusion, a reflexive self-realization, of Self *within* the distinction. It all gets very abstract doesn't it?