From nothing, something. That's more natural than nothing into nothing.

ant wrote:As a side note: I seriously doubt Plato's Realm of Perfect Forms exists on the space station.

who said it does?

ant wrote:That was a nice try by Yahweh's step child though.

do you get off on insulting me ant?



i wish you would just stick to substance and refrain from the personal needling.

but by all means if you want to cement your position as booktalk's resident prick then carry on.

The nature of time has been an obsession for me since I bought Being and Time by Martin Heidegger back in 1983, and then wrote my MA thesis on it.

'Eternal' is a word with several meanings, as I noted above in looking at the different ideas of permanence, values and logic. Etymologically, 'e-ternal' means 'outside time' or 'unchanging'. Mathematical relationships, because by definition they do not change, are therefore intrinsically eternal. Then the problem arises of how ideas exist. A good book on this topic is Is God a Mathematician? by Mario Livio, which points out that mathematical relationships are discovered not invented, so have independent real existence from human thought about them.

Plato discussed the relation between change and stability in his dialogue The Timaeus. Stability is always the same or identical. Change involves constant difference. For Plato, the model of identity and difference is the X in the sky formed by the unchanging path of the Milky Way Galaxy and the constantly changing path of the solar ecliptic, the path of the sun and planets.

'Forever' depends on your reference frame. In one sense diamonds are forever.

Lmao. Fiiiight! Are you going to take that Ant??? ::: stirring the pot::::

Arg, time to crack open Plato. Be back when I get done reading it. Tulip is getting older and all the drugs he did back in the 80's for Australia's army experiments have left him both highly intelligent and highly super crazy. All information must be confirmed by interpretation of sane individuals. Brb

OMG, Tulip, I stumbled on the perfect definition of you my friend.

Robert Tulip: Marsupial which seeks scientific truth combined with mythical truth in which great spiritual truths can be found.

How spot on is that? Honestly. It was right here in my translation of Timaeus.

I'll leave you the poem in the introduction as well. I know you like that.

I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great Ring of pure and endless light,
All calm, as it was bright;
And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years,
Driven by the spheres
Like a vast shadow moved. . .

thanks for the heads up on the Timaeus, i've been digging Pierre Grimes' series on Timaeus

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dnqq0ohx ... AEC7ECD2B5

Pierre breaks it down well IMO

and that lead to some Epicurus

damn these dudes of yore rock !

the breakdown of father, mother, son from Timaeus that Pierre covers there is such a doppelganger for the christian Father, Mary, Christ thing that they seem obvious motif doubles to me.

you find this motif repetition by the score when you start reading old texts, everything old is new again.

in fact the "theology" in the Timaeus seems such a vast improvement over "modern monotheisms" that i mourn the loss.

it's like the crowd is at the nickelback concert when Hendrix is playing to a few dozen round the corner, lucky sods

wow! how platonic is the NT!!

when you've got verses like

Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.

and

You however are to be complete in goodness, as your Heavenly Father is complete.

that is some platonic shit right there!!

i think i remember Pierre saying something like

every thinking christian should become a platonist

ahhh here it is

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KdmVe-uMkE

why thinking christians should become platonists.

President Camacho wrote:Lmao. Fiiiight! Are you going to take that Ant??? ::: stirring the pot::::

Arg, time to crack open Plato. Be back when I get done reading it. Tulip is getting older and all the drugs he did back in the 80's for Australia's army experiments have left him both highly intelligent and highly super crazy. All information must be confirmed by interpretation of sane individuals. Brb

Perhaps I am only mad in the sense that the divine Plato is crazy? The consensus view of modern science is that Platonic idealism is delusional, even though Plato is at the root of philosophy and science. I am interested in a paradigm shift, which naturally looks insane on the surface to those who are committed to the current false delusional dominant paradigm. Plato's theory of eternity is one typical topic that sends some people into emotional meltdown. And Camacho is making up the incredible hulk comparison. I have never been a part of army experiments.

He had to sign papers stating he would deny any involvement in said experiments, I'm sure. Either that or they erased his memory and we have to find a way of protecting ourselves just in case they trigger him.. like a one man sleeper cell. Sleeping Tulip.

Timaeus is little like anything else I've read of Plato. It resembles his other dialogues but it's fanciful and requires leaps of faith. Where the dialectic of Socrates chips away at assumption and seeks to prove a truth through keeping what can be proven through discourse and discarding what does not hold water, this dialogue has Timaeus talking about accepting tales which are probable AND INQUIRING NO FURTHER.

I'm accustomed to Socrates digging for answers and not being comfortable with statements merely because they sound truthful. He tested each statement for it's veracity by throwing the full weight of his intellect against it. Here there seems no such effort. I question just how old Plato was when he wrote this. Old men have a habit of becoming spiritual the older they get and for a poet, the condition is probably more acute.

Plato lacks common sense for his time as well. His whole theory of splitting up society in a hierarchical system comparable to his beloved Spartan constitution but run by philosophers was blasted apart by a level headed pupil of his. Socrates was a warrior who fought in multiple battles for Athens. Plato was no wimp, either... but something tells me Socrates kept him grounded and that the longer he was out of the picture the more he allowed his poetic side to dominate his thinking.

I'm about half way through. I'll let you know what I really think when I'm done.