17
Jul
2011
Turn That Frown Upside Down
If you are getting worried and stressed about things, keep these words from Jesus in mind:
1 “Let not your heart be troubled; you believe in God, believe also in Me. 2 In My Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. 3 And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also. 4 And where I go you know, and the way you know.”
You think they will raise the debt ceiling if I keep them in mind?
What if Paul Krugman is also at that place? Are you still going to try to debate him?
Scarcity won’t exist so we’ll get along fine.
If you identify yourself and Paul Krugman as individual entities who will “get along” with each other, then you are saying you and Krugman will be separable entities. That means each of your forms will exist and extend only so far and no further. That implies scarcity for both yourselves and the volumes of space that each of you will take up.
As long as you cannot “be” Paul Krugman, and as long as Paul Krugman cannot “be” you, then the ends that would potentially apply to each of you will be a set that is less the existence of the other individual. That means that if each of you are going to do anything, each of your existences will be compelled to select, intentionally or not, from a list of possibilities that is limited to the mutually exclusive set that is complimentary to the set that is the other individual.
Then add to this all the different people and other things that you believe could possibly exist in form and in volume, and scarcity will rise all the more.
You may be thinking at this point that people will not have physical bodies and will not have existences that extend only so far and no further. That they will have existences that extend infinitely far in every direction. Hence nobody will be limited in the ways I described above, and scarcity will not exist after all. The problem with this conception is that it implies every thing is the actually same thing. If every individual extends infinitely far in every direction, that means everybody is everywhere, which means whatever is there, is the same person. “Bob” and “Paul” would no longer have any meaning.
If you are prepared to accept that you and Krugman, and every other individual, would all be the same person-blob, then sure the physicality limitation would be overcome, but there would still remain the intellectual, cognitive separations, and thus limitations, between individuals. Everybody would be everywhere physically, but not everyone will think everywhere. Every individual’s thinking would be bounded and constrained to the thinking they do as individuals. If there are more than one individual doing any thinking, it means that for a given individual thinking, all other individuals are not doing that exact thinking. That means thinking would be scarce.
The only way out of this quandary would be if not only physicality were boundless and without constraint, but thinking be boundless and without constraint as well. But thinking without bounds and without constraints would become meaningless, as it would cease to follow the rules of, and hence be constrained by, ordinary propositional logic. You could not therefore even claim that “Paul Krugman AND I would get along” makes any sense. To say you AND Paul would be to constrain your thinking according to ordinary rules of logic.
In fact, saying anything at all about a place with no logical scarcity would necessitate the abandonment of all junctors (if, then, and, or) and quantors (there is, all, some, these) in your explanation of what you are seeking to explain. Any proposition, any proposition about anything at all, in order to be meaningful to us mortal humans, who are bounded by scarcity and by logical constraints, requires that such propositional junctors and quantors have meaning in the real world, or else one would just be talking gibberish.
So either heaven has scarcity, or else anything you say about it would have no meaning whatsoever.
Major Freedom,
If there is an unlimited quantity of everything available than the utility of each thing (no longer an economic good) would effectively be zero. So, no conflict could possibly arise, because there is enough of everything for everybody’s demands to be satisfied. This, I imagine, includes premium land. That two people can’t consume the same item or live on the same land is irrelevant, because there’s more of these items and lands than there is use for them.
I understand such Earthly logic.
I am talking about the entities doing the valuations, if any, in a place with allegedly no scarcity. I am talking about the implications of even considering multiple entities the way Murphy is doing when he says “I AND Krugman will get along.”
There cannot be an unlimited quantity of conceptual space available if there are more than one thinking things, like Murphy AND Krugman.
If there was an unlimited quantity of Krugman, then there could be no room for Murphy, and vice versa. In fact, an unlimited quantity of anything makes the existence of everything else impossible, because in order for any two things to exist, one thing’s possible extent must be reduced, at least, by the exact extent of the other thing.
If Murphy says “Krugman and I will get along”, then he is saying his existence is not infinite, but limited by the existence of Krugman, and that Krugman’s existence is not infinite, but limited by the existence of Murphy. Since there will undoubtedly be many individual people, then each person’s potential range of existence would be limited all the more.
Then there is the additional logical absurdity of believing that a God can be everywhere as well, and the problem is exponentially compounded.
The only way out of this conundrum is to either abandon Earthly logic entirely, or believe that heaven is the ultimate singularity, the ultimate void of nothingness, where there is not only zero physical separation, but even zero intellectual separation as well.
In both cases, it would be impossible to comprehend at all without contradiction, and it would make any claims to “understand what Jesus is saying” nothing but contradictory gobbledygook. In order for Jesus to even exist, it requires that everything else that could ever exist be limited in extent by the exact extent of Jesus.
Since when does a lack of scarcity require an unlimited amount of any particular entity?
Since it was possible to think of more than what exists, which necessarily bounds individuals to selecting among alternative ends and not all ends at once.
If I can conceive of an end that requires the usage of the reality that Jesus takes up (for example suppose my end is to exist to such an extent that there is no room for Jesus anywhere), then reality would invariably contain scarcity to me as long as Jesus exists.
This idea is ubiquitous as long as anything other than oneself exists and as long as one can conceive of ends for oneself that require the reality that other things take up by their very existence.
Humans perceive scarcity because we can perceive of ends and goals that cannot be satisfied due to the finiteness of our surroundings.
The finiteness of an individual’s surroundings will forever exist as long as something other than the individual exists, and takes up “existence space,” and the individual can perceive of ends that are impossible to fulfill because of the existence of the other things.
I can see a chink in this argument though, by asking “What is infinity minus 1?” Infinity? I know that’s what the mathematicians say, but I think this is a misnomer.
If you can identify any exclusion at all, then everything else cannot, in my mind, possibly be infinite, since we just identified something that is not included! Infinity means no exclusion at all, doesn’t it?
“If I can conceive of an end that requires the usage of the reality that Jesus takes up (for example suppose my end is to exist to such an extent that there is no room for Jesus anywhere), then reality would invariably contain scarcity to me as long as Jesus exists.”
Souls that think like that will be in the other place, Major.
Souls that think like that will be in the other place, Major.
Think like what? Logically?
Fine, if logical consistency irks you if the subject is Jesus, then substitute anything else besides Jesus in the place of Jesus. The same logic applies.
MF I don’t think you are reasoning properly about cash balances in the other thread. I will take Jesus’ description of heaven over your armchair logic.
Epic ad hominem tu quoque.
So that’s it, huh? “MF, since I don’t agree with you about A, it means anything you say about B, C, D, E, etc is therefore wrong/suspect.”
So much for your complaints on not wanting to be “purged” for your adherence to Keynesian interest theory. I guess only you can purge people.
And you still have not responded to the three criticisms I made about the liquidity preference in the other post by the way. If focusing on a red herring typo constitutes justification for declaring victory, then the bar must not have been where I thought it was.
I was making a joke MF. If you prefer, how’s this: “That’s your objection to Jesus’ remarks, MF? I feel like I climbed Mt. Everest and then you pointed out my fly was down.”
I was making a joke MF.
Oh, woops. Sorry. I thought you, me, us, etc, were still in seriousness mode.
If you prefer, how’s this: “That’s your objection to Jesus’ remarks, MF? I feel like I climbed Mt. Everest and then you pointed out my fly was down.”
I’d appreciate that a little more if the sagging fly wasn’t actually a central and crucial component to the main argument.
Oops sorry, someone posted a short comment–something like, “There would still be scarcity of agreements”–and I accidentally deleted it when I was cleaning out the spam folder. (It had been erroneously flagged as spam by WordPress.) So sorry, that wasn’t intentional. I didn’t DeGong you.