M.D. Rawlings
Classical Liberal
- May 26, 2011
- 4,123
- 931
Sentience IV
Sentience, in and of itself, is not self-awareness, metaphysically; rather, it's the foundation of self-awareness for finite beings and the foundation of self-awareness for finite beings only! Ultimately, God's consciousness, including His sentience, is the foundation of all other things that exist, including our consciousness. Non-technical definitions sometimes throw in the term aware, but this does not pertain to self-awareness, but to the awareness (more at the experience) of subjective impressions or feelings.
For humans, these subjective impressions include the experiential sensations/perceptions elicited by exterior phenomena.
Of course the idea of God necessarily asserts that God would be self-aware and universally other-aware of everything that exists without any gaps in His knowledge. God doesn't become aware, and His interior sentience would be purely mental impressions and emotions. Humans become aware. God would be eternally aware.
You're making a distinction between divine awareness and knowledge that makes no difference. They are one and the same thing!
Further, you're confounding an abridged definition of sentience that only applies to finite beings. The unabridged philosophical definition of metaphysics is the only one that matters universally.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience
I already shared this.
Pay particular attention to the following:
The universal essence of sentience is interiorly subjective experiences of mental impressions and emotions.
You've put me in a position where I find myself agreeing with the atheists against you, as you're not making any sense here, except in Amrchaos' case, as he thinks the possibility of divine sentience doesn't necessarily adhere to the idea of God in terms of first principles, which is patently false.
The possibility that God would be fully sentient cannot be logically ruled out. It's arguably a logical necessity for a fully conscious being of personhood, mortal or divine, to have emotions. In fact, I'd like someone on this thread explain to me how an omniscient God would not necessarily have emotions.
Think about that.
The Seven Things demonstrate that one cannot rationally rule out the possibility that we are finite expressions of God's consciousness. There's nothing in the laws of organic human thought that precludes this possibility, and of course divine sentience wouldn't apply to divinity in the exact same way that applies to humans. Your argument that the objective facts of human cognition (for there's no humans as such projecting) anthropomorphize God via the logical possibility/necessity that God has sentient impressions and feelings is bogus.
However, an all-knowing God would be able to experience precisely what we experience (the mental sensations, perceptions and emotions) via the contents of our minds, would He not? He would necessarily know and understand everything we're thinking or feeling. Ah! So it looks like He must have emotions, logically, in order to know what emotions are and how they are experienced/felt!
Finally, there seems to be some misunderstanding regarding the expressions of God's sentience in the Bible.
First, the Bible most certainly does assert that God is sentient, Boss. That cannot be denied. You are mistaken.
Second, the authors of the Bible don't mean that God literally hears, sees, smells, tastes or feels things in the sense that humans do as if he had physical ears, eyes, a nose, a tongue or a dermis. They're speaking metaphorically. They knew that the actual means of God's sentience and the higher cogitations thereof would have to be intellectual in nature, an operation of His divine omniscience, not literal, sensory transmissions or sensory data; and neither Jews nor Christians hold that the biblical construct of divine consciousness is an anthropomorphism. Nonsense! The Bible holds that we were created in God's image, that our consciousness is what it is because He made us in His likeness. We are finite expressions of His consciousness.
To the atheists on this thread: go on contradictorily presupposing God's existence as you necessarily do when you declare to know something about an existing God that the rest of us mere mortals cannot logically rule out!
Keep doing it. I dare you. I double dare you.
LOL!
No one escapes The Seven Things.
Sentience, in and of itself, is not self-awareness, metaphysically; rather, it's the foundation of self-awareness for finite beings and the foundation of self-awareness for finite beings only! Ultimately, God's consciousness, including His sentience, is the foundation of all other things that exist, including our consciousness. Non-technical definitions sometimes throw in the term aware, but this does not pertain to self-awareness, but to the awareness (more at the experience) of subjective impressions or feelings.
For humans, these subjective impressions include the experiential sensations/perceptions elicited by exterior phenomena.
Of course the idea of God necessarily asserts that God would be self-aware and universally other-aware of everything that exists without any gaps in His knowledge. God doesn't become aware, and His interior sentience would be purely mental impressions and emotions. Humans become aware. God would be eternally aware.
You're making a distinction between divine awareness and knowledge that makes no difference. They are one and the same thing!
Further, you're confounding an abridged definition of sentience that only applies to finite beings. The unabridged philosophical definition of metaphysics is the only one that matters universally.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience
I already shared this.
Pay particular attention to the following:
In the philosophy of consciousness, sentience can refer to the ability of any entity to have subjective perceptual experiences, or as some philosophers refer to them, 'qualia'.[1] This is distinct from other aspects of the mind and consciousness, such as creativity, intelligence, sapience, self-awareness, and intentionality (the ability to have thoughts 'about' something). Sentience is a minimalistic way of defining consciousness, which is otherwise commonly used to collectively describe sentience plus other characteristics of the mind.
The universal essence of sentience is interiorly subjective experiences of mental impressions and emotions.
You've put me in a position where I find myself agreeing with the atheists against you, as you're not making any sense here, except in Amrchaos' case, as he thinks the possibility of divine sentience doesn't necessarily adhere to the idea of God in terms of first principles, which is patently false.
The possibility that God would be fully sentient cannot be logically ruled out. It's arguably a logical necessity for a fully conscious being of personhood, mortal or divine, to have emotions. In fact, I'd like someone on this thread explain to me how an omniscient God would not necessarily have emotions.
Think about that.
The Seven Things demonstrate that one cannot rationally rule out the possibility that we are finite expressions of God's consciousness. There's nothing in the laws of organic human thought that precludes this possibility, and of course divine sentience wouldn't apply to divinity in the exact same way that applies to humans. Your argument that the objective facts of human cognition (for there's no humans as such projecting) anthropomorphize God via the logical possibility/necessity that God has sentient impressions and feelings is bogus.
However, an all-knowing God would be able to experience precisely what we experience (the mental sensations, perceptions and emotions) via the contents of our minds, would He not? He would necessarily know and understand everything we're thinking or feeling. Ah! So it looks like He must have emotions, logically, in order to know what emotions are and how they are experienced/felt!
Finally, there seems to be some misunderstanding regarding the expressions of God's sentience in the Bible.
First, the Bible most certainly does assert that God is sentient, Boss. That cannot be denied. You are mistaken.
Second, the authors of the Bible don't mean that God literally hears, sees, smells, tastes or feels things in the sense that humans do as if he had physical ears, eyes, a nose, a tongue or a dermis. They're speaking metaphorically. They knew that the actual means of God's sentience and the higher cogitations thereof would have to be intellectual in nature, an operation of His divine omniscience, not literal, sensory transmissions or sensory data; and neither Jews nor Christians hold that the biblical construct of divine consciousness is an anthropomorphism. Nonsense! The Bible holds that we were created in God's image, that our consciousness is what it is because He made us in His likeness. We are finite expressions of His consciousness.
To the atheists on this thread: go on contradictorily presupposing God's existence as you necessarily do when you declare to know something about an existing God that the rest of us mere mortals cannot logically rule out!
Keep doing it. I dare you. I double dare you.
LOL!
No one escapes The Seven Things.
