Historical footnote: the ancients and medievals all believed that the planets and starts occupied a realm of changeless perfection, the so-called 'superlunary sphere' which in many minds was heaven itself. The discovery of things that changed in this sphere, such as supernova, caused severe consternation. Even though this model came under pressure from the heliocentric view, Kepler himself was convinced that the orbit of the planets was defined by the Platonic solids. Then of course it gradually dawned on mankind that the superlunerary sphere is not a perfect world of changeless classical perfection at all, but mainly unthinkably enormous distances inhabited mostly by lifeless matter. So the great medieval sythensis and the Great Chain of Being came crashing down to be replaced by the lifeless mechanistic system of Descartes and Galileo.And here we all are.:bigsmile:

I agree. I don't see how anyone truly lives without these notions.

, why not the notion of free will? Which many profess to discard (by the way). .

So small letter truths are what, chopped liver? It is not important that Mars is the fourth planet? How about the second law of thermodynamics? How does that truth rank in the scale of importance? Is that not knowledge (or is it Knowledge) either? I was under the impression that Plato thought that a justified true belief was knowledge. By the way, what is true does not have to be known, so even if Mars is the fourth planet is a truth, it need not be known by anyone, and not so long ago it was not known by anybody.

Of course one could just have abandoned the notion of God as eternal changless perfection and substituted the immanent god in relationship to creation and the world and avoided some of the relgious consequences.

The division between life and no life is somewhat artificial.
The division between mind and no mind is somewhat artificial.

One can then infer that (mind and life) are Illusions in a cold, lifeless, deterministic, materialistic machine like world
or
One can infer that the world itself is full of life and mind like properties

I choose the latter view: that the universe is more of an organism than a machine and is perceptive, responsive, striving and enchanted to the core.

People profess lots of things which their behavior belies. I can not imagine anyone who does not deliberate about their perceived choices and then believe that it makes a difference to the future what action they perform.
Free will as the ability to do otherwise not as actions without causes.

---------- Post added 05-12-2010 at 07:49 PM ----------

I choose the latter view: that the universe is more of an organism than a machine and is perceptive, responsive, striving and enchanted to the core.

In physics, the treatment of time is a central issue. It has been treated as a question of geometry. One can measure time and treat it as a geometrical dimension, such as length, and perform mathematical operations on it. It is a scalar quantity and, like length, mass, and charge, is usually listed in most physics books as a fundamental quantity.

For instance, time and distance are related to each other by the speed of light, c, which is a fundamental constant

--So far, c seems like the top speed of information. What about entanglement? I don't know enough about it. Is entanglement a possible exception to this? Does anybody know?

Yes for paired or entagled quantum particles, seemingly the transmission of information is instantaneous (faster than light). This gives rise to the notion that everything is connected and perceiving by some mode other than the transmission of quanta. There is some dispute about the instantaneous nature of gravity as well. Mostly since there is no quantum theory of gravity and gravity waves have not been detected.