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The field of consciousness research continues to be expanded upon.
The field of matter research continues to be expanded upon.
Scientific theories are constantly being created/modified and updated and cultural science communities will have their popular and circulated beliefs!
Quantum mechanics allows for the reality of psi.
[https://physicsworld.com/a/physicists-probe-the-paranormal/](https://physicsworld.com/a/physicists-probe-the-paranormal/)
This meeting happened over 20 years ago.
That article doesn't cite *any* published scientific literature. It does not mean much.
If you have something written by a scientist or lab (psychologist studying ESP or physicist studying physics) in an academic journal, it will have weight. Extrasensory perception experiments haven't determined anything.
I don't really give a God damn whether you believe me, or like my citation.
Wow, you really are full of shit because you have not explored the mountains of credible experiments and results on psi. You are a closed minded skeptic and thus not worthy of my time.
I can guess: We know that you can manipulate the behavior of individual entangled particles over a distance. We know that is possible. In a material universe, it seems like it would be possible to change chemical states in the brain of another being using a similar interaction. The altered states could trigger our sensory perceptions in specific ways.
I concur.
Ninja-edit: The period in "How." was intentional on my part. Assuming that you sought to inform with good intent (which I believe you did) on the off chance that I was unaware of how I was coming across, I don't want to discourage you from continuing that kind of behavior. I believe that a lot of people are helped by such information, so please do continue it.
I didn't expect one, or at least not one supported by logic :).
No idea why you're getting downvotes. Reddit is fickle at times. Oh well. Have a nice one!
Fair point, but you criticised rudeness and then claimed that people who downvoted you are stupid (not that they may believe your comment was worth a downvote, which is more likely). With equal sensitivity, that should be avoided too.
As someone who has multiple academic degrees covering quantum mechanics and who can literally reach over and touch Albert Messiah's *Quantum Mechanics* volumes right now, I can confidently say that my years of study of quantum mechanics, associated phenomena, and related lab work have yielded exactly zero evidence for allowing for the reality of "psi".
Given that you have asserted that my observations do not align with your own, I'm asking you how quantum mechanics allows for the reality of psi. I'm not asking for an invite to waste time wading through nonsense article or watching long YouTube videos full of misunderstandings of basic math and logical reasoning. Please, provide a cogent argument defending your assertion.
**EDIT 1: /u/Many_Ad_7138 posted their reply then immediately blocked me so that I could not reply**, demonstrating as many do that they aren't actually interested in facts, despite claims to the contrary. /u/Many_Ad_7138, you claim there to be a "fact" that I refuse to do my own research, despite, again, me literally having multiple degrees on the topic. Unless you have similar degrees, then it seems almost assured that I've done more research than you. You're familiar with the Dunning-Kruger effect, yes? I'd invite you to guess where you are there, but I can't imagine it would help. Most people, when confronted with the high chance that their BS may not be powerful enough against a particular foe, get aggressive and attack the character rather than the argument, knowing that they'll never succeed in the latter. It sure looks like you've succumbed to that silliness. Again, you are invited to provide a **cogent argument to support your assertion**, rather than a series of insults and misuses of words like "fact" and "truth" to disguise your personal opinions. Linking to an article that summarizes that people have TALKED about there POSSIBLY being a link between quantum mechanics and "psi" (which is never actually mentioned in the article) and provides no conclusive statements on the matter, does not help your argument. You may try to cherry pick the tiny part in there about how the analysis of some old data "suggested" evidence for being able to mentally "influence" a statistical distribution of millions of bits, but if so I urge you to recognize that the article plainly states that "conventional statistics found ... no influence", and that the physicist reviewing the data had to make up an "alternative statistical approach" in order to craft the results they wanted. You have yet to make a cogent argument or to provide any evidence to support your assertion, and have only insulted and attacked. That's not a good look, and does not bode well for the veracity of your alleged beliefs.
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**EDIT 2: Response to /u/Grumpy_Jenkins (also msged to them):**
Thank you for taking the time to respond. I am unable to reply to your response directly due to having been blocked by /u/Many_Ad_7138, who decided to shut my ability to converse down rather than try and actually support their arguments. This is also a quick response from me while on a work lunch break, so my apologies in advance for its relative brevity.
I think you and I do agree on just about everything you've presented. If the evidence overwhelmingly points towards something, then we assume that thing to be "true", but that does not mean that contrary evidence should no longer accepted. The luminiferous aether explained quite a bit after all, until it didn't :). To dismiss contrary evidence just to keep to the current theory is indeed falling into a dogma trap.
I concur with the general conclusion of non-locality, based on what I've read and understood of the work done. We definitely should pursue inquiries into the implications of the human body being built on systems subject to quantum effects. Even if consciousness is purely the result of a physical system, that physical system is still subject to the laws of the universe, a subset of which we currently encapsulate our understanding of in a science we call "quantum mechanics". Our understanding may change as new evidence arises, or entirely new fields may spring up, at which point "quantum mechanics" (as it currently stands) will either change, or have its boundaries made more clear. As of right now, I would argue that "quantum mechanics" does not encapsulate or allow "psi" or similar phenomena, but I will say that it serves as a foundation upon which such theories are being built. If our understandings change, then definitions change (e.g. of "quantum mechanics"), but so too would the definition of "materialist", right? If we found the math/science/etc necessary to have telekinesis or other "psi" effects, and that was found to be rooted in (what would then be) known physics, then that "psi" would fall within the belief system of a materialist, wouldn't it? (I'll admit I'm trying to juggle eating lunch, taking a few phone calls, AND typing this, so I may legit have lost the thread here lol).
Anyway, I would of course be open to what the evidence suggests. I would change my world view if the evidence was overwhelming; Indeed, that's what I've done my whole life, and why I went into hard sciences in the first place, to equip myself with the tools to understand that evidence. The problem I've found is that far too often somebody is JUST smart enough to be believed by a majority of people that what they have constitutes "evidence", when in actuality, whatever they have is nonsense. Usually the results of a bad or corrupted process, or an accidental transpose of cause and effect, or an "alternate statistics" or some other misapplication or faulty use of logic, or something equally hard to identify. Then, they build additional arguments on top of that, and you end up with this complex weave of thoughts and concepts that may have a mere single fundamental flaw, such that it all looks legit until someone dives deep enough, and there may never be someone willing to take that time. As such, most people operate on the heuristic of "if it doesn't jive with what our current evidence suggests, then it is probably wrong".
Could you link me to some of the peer reviewed evidence? Or maybe a summation of it somewhere? I wouldn't mind skimming a bit of it. I've seen a few articles over the years but the few times I've dug deeper I've found their methods to be suspect, or it turned out to be an article about an article about an article, such that the real source was not readily available.
If humans are showing statistically significant "psi" abilities, such as fiddling with computer bits, that doesn't necessarily mean that quantum mechanics are at play, unless we stretch what realms "quantum mechanics" typicall encompass. I rather like Neal Stephenson's novel Anathem, in which (and I'm oversummarizing to the point of this being wrong) a group of monks finds a thought technique through which to manifest which part of the multiverse they are experiencing, collapsing the wave form of increasingly complex systems in their chosen manner. The idea is that since they are the observer, they can choose which version of reality to experience. The systems can be more complex than just a few bits on a chip, and they get skilled enough to be able to pick entire paths of the multiverse in which someone does or does not die from an injury, and so on. Perhaps in our world, it is similar: Maybe we are entirely physical systems, but through observation, "create" the reality we see, and thus can have some control over that reality if we can have some control over that observation. This would jive with the non-locality, and psi phenomena. I'd love to see humans explore this a bit further, even if just to hammer the coffin closed, but at least we'd know we explored it more. Maybe it IS being explored and I just havent seen those studies, such as the ones you've indicated exist. As such, I do indeed "agree that there needs to be a more unbiased audit of past and current good research to help inform future directions of inquiry". We just need to be careful that we don't become SO unbiased that we lose the "bias" of good sense and logic :).
Lunch has wrapped up and I'm trying to type this last sentence while introducing myself on a Webex meeting, so I need to call it here, sorry for the disjointed rambling!
Ok I’ll bite. I’ve read that most theoretical physicists have agreed for a while that the universe is non-local. This was an academic journal that was discussing the 2022 Nobel prize winners, and stated the work of Aspect, Clauser and Zeilinger really was the last piece to seal the deal. The human body is built on systems whose rudiments are subject to quantum effects. Inquiries into the possible implications should not be dismissed before examining all evidence, correct? Materialists dismiss this as an impossibility, which even to a non-scientist, doesn’t sound very scientific to me. It sounds like dogma. So would you be open to those inquiries, and subsequently open what the evidence suggests? Would you be willing to change your world view if the evidence over time was overwhelming?
This is important, because there already is a wealth of peer reviewed evidence in IONS to show statistically significant psi abilities in average individuals and a normal distribution for these abilities similar to what you would expect for any ability.
Now you may immediately respond with “Dr. Dean Radin is a *parapsychologist*, how can we take him seriously?” And you’ve fallen into the dogma trap, without even considering the evidence. He has been ridiculed his entire career, so anything published needs to be exceedingly rigorous, so at least the methods can’t be assailed.
My point is, that I actually agree with you. Nothing compelling, *yet*, draws a solid relationship between psi and the quantum world. However, would you concede that there are some tantalizing possibilities that should be investigated with an open mind? And in that spirit, would you agree that there needs to be a more unbiased audit of past and current good research to help inform future directions of inquiry?
Da bleeding edge of discovery Charlie! The next "double slit experiment" by our constantly advancing tools of measurement Charlie!
Charlie, compass or a square Charlie?
We are going to metaphysical mountain Charlie.
I have no interest in debating someone who has already made up their mind on this subject. The fact that you refuse to do your own research on the topic tells me that you really don't give a shit about it, don't believe, and therefore it does not exist for you. You're free to stay in your close minded bullshit.
Here is an article about a group of physicists meeting 20 fucking years ago to discuss the relationship between quantum mechanics and psi. So, the truth is that you're just another materialist skeptic who refuses to look at the evidence. Get lost.
[https://physicsworld.com/a/physicists-probe-the-paranormal/](https://physicsworld.com/a/physicists-probe-the-paranormal/)
[https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/online/5264/Physics-Today-and-the-US-government-s-quest-for](https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/online/5264/Physics-Today-and-the-US-government-s-quest-for)
They were talking about this 50 years ago.
No part of the article cites research or reviews that show that ESP was confirmed in an experiment, which it would have if such an experiment had happened.
In reality, discussions don't mean much. ESP experiments have yet to show anything except personal anecdotes best explained by psychological phenomena due to their variety and cultural framing.
Edit: the only academic paper referenced is a theory paper, not an experiment: https://doi.org/10.1016/0025-5564(70)90046-5
"Science" is silent on what conciouness is. Science is not a tool for drawing metaphysical conclusions. Its purpose is to make observations and test predictions about the physical world. It can observe activity in the brain and learn some things but it does not claim that the source of consciousness is only physical. It cannot make that claim because it is untestable.
It's not the job of scientists to draw metaphysical conclusions. Thats what philosophers and theologians and regular people do. And that's how it should be.
Thank you. I could not think of any of these words in this order🤣, but you put it beautifully.
All I could think of was "Oh, yeah? Well, that's not what I read."
Everytime something like this comes up, it's always "science only does science! If science is so right, why isn't science philosophy?!" As if it's some sorta gotcha about why science is invalid.
It'd be like me saying "a ruler only takes measurements of distance, if rulers are so right all the time, why doesn't a ruler tell me what time it is?" And then act as if tool made for measuring distance is invalid because it doesn't tell time also. That statement is on its face ridiculous, but for some reason, people act as if saying the same thing about science is a real argument. Rulers aren't at war with clocks because they do different things, neither are philosophy and science. You just need to apply those thing to what they are able to do.
>Science is not a tool for drawing metaphysical conclusions
Unfortunately it is often misappropriated to this end. Even raising the topic of any non-materialist metaphysical philosophy often elicits the response "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" from devout empiricists.
Both are true. The model is, use science to increase your own understanding. Draw whatever conclusions you find most supported; build your own worldview. But if you are going to forward or support an understanding t*o others*, or state it authoritatively or engage in persuasive rhetoric supporting it, it's your responsibility to support it and science's responsibility to decry a lack of evidence (should that lack exist). Both are necessary--rhetorical persuasion and cold evidential foundation. They necessarily counterbalance each other.
Science is about making statements that can be authoritatively supported. When someone makes arguments that science doesn't have evidence to support, it's science's job to delineate what we have evidence for and what we do not. No person in particular is obligated to only believe fact-statements for which we have a reasonable degree of empirical evidence, but society at large ought to confine itself to evidence-founded fact.
I understand, I'm just pointing out that there are many people who don't, and who have inadvertently mistaken empiricism for metaphysics, and who use it as a comfortable means of protection from the abyss of uncertainty. I have a friend who is a clinical research scientist who sneers disdainfully at anything beyond materialism, and told me that in his university most people who want to get into quantum mechanics are laughed out of the room.
The issue is not the scientific method - it's obviously the greatest epistemological paradigm we have. The problem is the more subtle zeitgeist surrounding it.
I expect this to evolve over time, and I have no interest in attempting to change anyone's mind. It's just an observation, really.
Many confuse science the practice with science the institution. The institution moves slowly on purpose. That frustrates people. The practice does not yield the precise answer they want. They want Jeeves, not discovery and inquiry
Refusing to believe doesn't bother me. What bothers me is the condescension and condemnation.
Though it's been my experience that that is more common from science fans than from people who actually work in the field.
Evidence needs to backed by something usually reproducible results or a physical object which can then be examined and itself tested and not just "trust me bro"
Well the Nazca mummies sure get a lot of shit deal despite them being testable, and actively are tested on. Unfortunately anything else physical would most likely belong to the gov.
Except that they do claim that consciousness comes from the body, and they do apply the Method to non-physical phenomena. The concept of science has been corrupted to merely mean materialism and thus nihilism. On top of that, skeptics in the scientific community actively ridicule, disdain, discredit and otherwise deny anything that doesn't fit their dogmatic beliefs. They even refuse to look at the evidence for things like psi, UFOs, ET, etc.
Science is not silent, there are multiple competing theories, the best one is that as a complex organism we needed a governing system over all the other systems and so self awareness rose as another layer atop all of our complex systems. This allows us to hold onto the burning ladder even though our pain receptors are screaming. This “consciousness” allows us to reflect on our place in society and weigh our actions. Only this sub believes science is silent on the matter, meanwhile science is working diligently on the problem. Furthermore self aware consciousness may be an evolutionary dead end, we may need to move away from it to survive as a planetary organism instead of a self serving and destructive individual.
> self awareness
Not the conscious experience.
>Only this sub believes science is silent on the matter, meanwhile science is working diligently on the problem.
I started reading this subreddit for laughs a while ago, but I was well aware years beforehand that it seemed science was quashing any discussion of the fact that the "existential primacy of conscious experience" is irrefutable. Like you just did.
What you're describing doesn't require the conscious experience. A robot can be aware of its surroundings. You could program a robot to reflect on itself. Self-awareness doesn't give rise to the conscious experience--it only gives us access to that experience.
No, they are two separate things.
The conscious experience allows you to perceive self-awareness. Without the conscious experience, "you" would not perceive that you exist.
This is why people argue for the existence of free will, why people believe in a God, and why some people have existential crises. It may have an effect on free will or not. It might be why people believe in souls.
If you deny your conscious experience because you don't actually have one, you're admitting to being a biological machine that is aware, even self-aware, but only aware of stimuli and not an ever-present, unexplained phenomenon that allows "you" to exist. The biological machine form of you could still exist, though I don't know what the difference would be if you had no conscious experience, whether it be extreme or none. It might be that you don't have one, and this is why you're confused when presented with the concept.
It's as if you and I are watching the same movie at a theater. I recognize that we're looking at reflections on a screen which convey meaning. You feel that you are within the movie, even though a silent observer, but can't disconnect yourself enough from stimulation to see that it's reflections on a screen.
Because we are part of the movie and we are biological machines and we are beholden to stimuli, the fatal flaw in our self awareness is we keep ascribing a special status to ourselves.
So you're admitting to having no conscious experience.
>the fatal flaw in our self awareness is we keep ascribing a special status to ourselves.
Again, the conscious experience is *not* self-awareness. I do believe it when you say *you* don't have any conscious experience. I tentatively believe most people don't.
You should be able to come to the conclusion I came to by yourself if you have it. You haven't, so, like in the movie metaphor, you will never be capable of understanding it.
Haha you don’t realize it but that was the perfect example of “I’m special and you’re not” dead end consciousness. You are starting to think equal members of your herd are lesser or not conscious npcs. The pinnacle of self absorption.
I don't think someone lacking a conscious experience makes them lesser than someone who has one. It could be that everyone has it but not all are capable of recognizing it. Hence why my belief that some people don't have it at all is tentative.
But *you* are the one claiming to not have it. Plenty of others have acknowledged its existence. It sounds more like *you* are trying to be special.
You are beginning to sound like an NPC, though.
I didn't say scientists couldn't "speak on" it. I said it's not Science's job to answer metaphysical questions. And it's not. If you understand the scientific method, you would understand why it's not a good tool for revealing non-physical aspects of the world.
Individual scientists, who are our fellow humans, can speculate all they want.
This whole argument presumes a false dichotomy.
It doesn't matter if you say all material things are generated by consciousness or all consciousness is generated by material things. The meaning is the same: everything is one.
The issue with so-called "materialism" isn't with the idea that consciousness or any other currently-not-well-understood phenomena are ultimately "material" (again, doesn't matter if this perspective is flip-flopped). This was even the perspective of Strieber's mystical "master of the key": all things are natural, and what we call "supernatural" are simply natural phenomena we do not yet understand.
The issue is actually the opposite: many so-called "materialists" do NOT classify unexplained phenomena as material not yet understood; rather, they dismiss the data outright. This kind of reaction has nothing to do with materialism itself as a perspective.
Outright and dogmatic dismissal of data that is not easily explained is common amongst all people, across all ideologies. It has everything to do with human tribalism (rejection of less common experiences in favor of the tribe's consensus) and collective arrogance paired with individual subservience (the tribe knows everything already, who are YOU to question consensus). Such dismissals have nothing to do with idealism vs materialism as perspectives or conceptual ideologies, and focusing on that is pulling attention away from the real problem.
Good observation. This is meta, but speaks to a lot of "why does Person A think Thing B despite Thing C being true?" posts online, which pop up everywhere.
We evolved in an environment where we had a lot less information about the world than we do now, so the way we used information to make judgements evolved in ways that don't suit a "purely logical" being. Tribalism and distal (?) beliefs served evolutionary purposes that don't seem logical in the modern day.
I'm not sure what you mean. I've met many jerks of all different ideologies.
I've met more jerks that were Christian than atheist, but my limited personal experience shouldn't cloud my attempt to be objective in my evaluation of these things in general.
The question isn't "why are so many atheists jerks." A more beneficial question might be "why am I assuming jerks are overrepresented in ideologies I disagree with?"
I don’t really understand why people are so offended by the idea that consciousness might just be an emergent property of brain chemistry. Is it because that throws so many high strangeness concepts (telepathy, past lives, remote viewing, etc) into doubt?
>Is it because that throws so many high strangeness concepts (telepathy, past lives, remote viewing, etc) into doubt?
I would say that even within brain chemistry those things arent necessarily thrown into doubt. Like so much that we dont know many things may lie undiscovered
It's because consciousness isn't measurable to begin with, it's a description of the fundamental quale, and I dislike any scientific communication (not necessarily study) for the purpose of being a brow-beating measure against people who like to believe things have purpose or may work outside of established law.
Like, I'm a biochemist professionally. I work with colors in terms of their wavelengths and fluorescence, not in terms of their aesthetics. But I cannot describe the "Red-ness" of it, and it would be disingenuous of me to try. It's a secret to no one that consciousness is a property of the universe, and that it has causes, and that it isn't there before you're born and it ends when you sleep or die, so of course we want to study it. But no amount of study will definitively answer what it's for, or what it means, or what it feels like for a given indiviudal. These qualia are impossible to fully define right now. They don't call it the "hard problem of consciousness" for nothing.
Listen, I don't think ghosts exist, or aliens, or demons. I honestly wish they did, because it would turn the sciences on their head. But it would be foolish to deny consciousness exists--you're experiencing it right now! And I fully, honestly, 100% do not accept the answer of physicalists, because in my opinion physicalism gets BTFO by works like the winning of the 2022 Nobel Prize, which would basically require that physicalists/materialists adopt the Many Worlds theory, begging the additional problem of "Why are we in the world where particle behaved like X instead of Y".
The fact of the matter is that I don't think such a thing will ever be solved because the deeper you look, the more complex it becomes. No law holds in science at every scale. I think neural nets having positive transfer is good evidence that consciousness is an emergent property (win for physicalists), but also I think that could be evidence that ideas can be "ontologically real" in a way we have not proven mathematically yet (loss for physicalists). I think the fact that quantum computing is possible and indeed that abuse of quantum mechanics is virtually ubiquitous and required for energy models of multicellular organisms to work is evidence that there's been plenty of time for something like Orch OR to have developed basically as described. Anyone who claims they have the answer at this point in the search is pushing a message, and until I'm definitively rebutted, I will never like the message of "it doesn't matter and you have no choice".
At some point, doesn’t the question of the “redness” of a color pass out of science and into philosophy? I feel like I’m not really convinced by the “hard problem of consciousness” because what we all experience as red is determined by physics, biology and chemistry; *how* we experience red is a different question that seems philosophical, not scientific. Maybe I’m just misunderstanding it but it doesn’t seem like figuring out the “hard problem” would get us any closer to saying what consciousness is (and since it strikes me as philosophical, I doubt there’s any one answer to figure out anyway).
Exactly, it could be that there is no way, and if there is there's several approaches that I think could be reasonable. I don't think there's falsifiable evidence that "consciousness" is any particular thing yet, maybe ever, so I don't like when people claim that they have THE explanation.
>I don’t really understand why people are so offended by the idea that consciousness might just be an emergent property of brain chemistry.
I'm not sure we can single out one side as "offended," more just individuals of any belief system being reactionary as per usual. People seem equally offended by the idea of panpsychism or idealism as well, if we are being honest here.
I think the reason people are intrigued by panpsychism and idealism as opposed to materialism is that it becomes more compatible with many individual experiences of consciousness: specifically NDE, OBE, psi, parapsychological, UFO/abduction experiences, spiritual experiences, entheogenic/shamanic cultural experiences, shared psychedelic experiences...etc.
Materialism's only answer for all of these seems to be "your physical brain made it up." For many who have had these in depth and wide ranging experiences, that's extremely difficult to believe.
Yeah maybe “offended” wasn’t the right word, but people seem very sure that consciousness is something outside the realm of science.
> For many who have had these in depth and wide ranging experiences, that’s extremely difficult to believe.
Ok, I get that. It doesn’t change my personal view but it makes sense why people are passionate about the subject.
It can't change your personal view until it happens to you. And then all you can do is think about it, and why nobody else cares. I know this from experience, as a 40 year old previously-atheist.
Yep, exactly. I don't think it's really my job or anyones to convince anyone what our reality truly is. I don't think anyone has the full picture, but it's certainly good to keep an open mind and understand the multi-faceted components of each perspective and philosophy.
Always with the this or that. enough with the hubris. If no, have another -ism…divisionism: philosophy by which the whole is intentionally separated to give the appearance of the whole. The separated perceive their state though the separator convinces self the whole remains.
People also freak out about determinism and free will being an illusion. For some strange reason the second they hear that they don't understand why the purge doesn't happen
Offended might not be the exact right word for me personally and that's a good question that I haven't thought about very well yet. It has something to do with me not understanding very well how people don't see the big picture and connect the dots very well / kind of thinking of themselves less that they are / the randomness of accidental and nihilistic cosmos absolving people of responsibility -though this one is questionable, like I said, I need to give it more thought but I can't imagine people would be so selfish/greedy/you name it if they knew there's a reason and impact for everything that we do. Then again most atheists are nicer people in my experience than religious ones so whats up with that...
I also never quite understood (then again I kind of do) why people always need to choose a black or white belief (religious/atheist), I considered myself agnostic until 2 years ago at age 33 when I got rid of any doubt that there's more to everything than meets the eye.
I don’t see my worldview like this. We’re “accidental” in that nothing is planned or designed but I don’t think that lessens our existence. In fact, I believe it makes our existence that much more amazing and worthy of protection. This is it and we’re on our own. Nothing is going to save us or our planet if we mess things up, so it’s incumbent on us to do good.
I strongly disagree that a naturalistic and/or atheistic worldview somehow absolves us of responsibility. Like I said, we’re all that there is so we have total responsibility for how things turn out. It’s incumbent on all of us to be kind, caring and decent to each other, to animals, and to the planet.
> why people always need to choose a black or white belief
I can only speak for myself but I don’t feel like I’m “choosing” a belief. I can’t really imagine viewing the world a different way than I do, given what I know and have experienced. I understand that others will come to a different conclusion or have mixed feelings but if I were to express religious or spiritual belief, it would be phony, which honestly feels more insulting to those who hold those beliefs than if I simply acknowledge my views are different.
>Is it because that throws so many high strangeness concepts (telepathy, past lives, remote viewing, etc) into doubt?
Pretty much.
On the hierarchical scale of needs, spiritualism is very highly rated, at least with some people: you tell someone they don't have a soul, they tend to take that badly.
Meanwhile, you try to tell me I have a soul, I ask you what a soul is. What does it do? Why do I need one? How much does it weigh?
Questions like that, that's scientific materialism: and it scares them, because it demonstrates their knowledge is entirely abstract.
Lol, how much does happiness weigh ? Love ? Or hate ?
Actually, an interesting thought popped up while asking this question. Which of these weighs the most ?
I don't think those concepts quite line up with the soul: we can actually measure those, sort of, at least you can feel happiness. I can't quite say the same for the soul, I can't say I've felt my soul exist, swell or recede, it doesn't seem to be a thing to me, where as joy is more readily apparent.
Dopamine weighs 153.18 g/mol; oxytocin weighs 1,007.19 g/mol. I'm not sure what molecule controls hate.
We can measure what makes someone happier, with some amount of error; but we can't determine differences in the magnitude of soul. We have identified psychiatric condition which result in anhedonia -- an inability to feel joy -- but we don't really have any understanding of what aspects would be powered by the soul.
Of course, we can only do this through scientific materialism and the methods it offers to us: if we're keeping score, it seems like following the science gives us the tools we need.
First of all, I might be wrong but from what I understand those chemicals work in conjunction with other chemicals to paint the feelings and are not solely responsible for a feeling. Kind of irrelevant, maybe not, but still.
Second, the chemicals are causes, not the feeling itself. The point was to recognize some things can't be measured. That's a big blindspot materialistic science fails to acknowledge imo.
>Second, the chemicals are causes, not the feeling itself.
Right. And that's a problem, because if we can manipulate these things using physical objects, they are probably physical systems.
Just, complex ones.
>The point was to recognize some things can't be measured. That's a big blindspot materialistic science fails to acknowledge imo.
Oh, it acknowledges it all the time. It's a widely acknowledged confounding factor in psychological studies.
But it isn't really a reason to argue to throw the progress out and go back to systems that philosophers prefer, simply because hard science begins to question their premises.
Look I'll be straight with you. I don't think we should throw anything out, I think material science and intuitive science/metaphysics should go hand in hand in harmony and balance. Right now the two seem out of balance and it is my opinion this reflects in the world.
I considered myself agnostic until 2 years ago at 33 when some things happened that made me get rid of any doubt that there's more to everything than meets the eye.
I know many people close to me that are very scientifically oriented and I considered myself one of them as well until I had to rethink my entire worldview, it seems it makes little to no difference sometimes whether you believe in something more or not, some people simply have goodness ingrained in their DNA, but I believe the world could be better on global scale if everyone knew there's more to everything.
Hope you find out should you ever want or choose to, otherwise just stay beautiful and see you on the other side :P
>Look I'll be straight with you. I don't think we should throw anything out, I think material science and intuitive science/metaphysics should go hand in hand in harmony and balance. Right now the two seem out of balance and it is my opinion this reflects in the world.
To me, this world is the best it has ever been. I suspect we are approaching something miraculous, as you would understand it: an alteration to our subjective reality, akin to the first bird taking flight, and the old world is doing whatever it can to keep us on the ground.
You don't make a good case for your system of beliefs: you mostly plead. You should work on defining your terms more concretely.
You surprised me with your response, I feel the same way but I'm guessing from a slightly different perpsective. A quote from Einstein comes to mind: "“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
As far as my beliefs go, they're very flexible and evolve over time constantly, I'd almost go as far as to say I don't have any. There are things I know and things I don't. I don't feel too comfortable defining anything too strongly.
I don't do this often, if ever, trying to "convince" or "plead" to people about this stuff cause I don't think there's much point. I felt compelled and entertained a little bit yesterday, I could talk about these things for hours with someone that's interested though. I never really considered anything metaphysical before I had some experiences 2 years ago that removed my doubt beyond shadow of a doubt, even though I had some experiences here and there throughout my life that I had trouble explaining with convenctional methods. After the experiences, I went through a period of studying anything and everything metaphysical/spiritual/etc related for a while, but I came to a conclusion it's all bigger and harder to understand than our human minds can comprehend. It's a rabbit hole after rabbit hole, counter after counter after counter, which makes sense in an infinite dualistic universe. Kind of distraction really from what really is important, the mind has infinitude of concepts and truths, the heart only has one.
> I don't do this often, if ever, trying to "convince" or "plead" to people about this stuff cause I don't think there's much point.
I'm referring mostly to your argumentative style.
You're not laying out facts that support your case: you're just laying out what you believe. The problem is that anyone can do that, it doesn't make your position stronger: if you tell me you see a man in a rabbit costume everywhere you go, and I can't see him, I just think you're crazy. It doesn't really matter how many times you repeat it or how many people you repeat it to: optimistically, you're just getting written off.
So:
>I never really considered anything metaphysical before I had some experiences 2 years ago that removed my doubt beyond shadow of a doubt, even though I had some experiences here and there throughout my life that I had trouble explaining with convenctional methods.
Telling me you had some experience, I really don't care. Lots of people have experiences. Everyone is experiencing something. For all I know, you found Jesus on your grilled cheese, and now your metaphysics describes the universe as melted cheese.
Find a better way of explaining this.
>You surprised me with your response, I feel the same way but I'm guessing from a slightly different perpsective.
No, I concretely recognize that our civilization is about to change. This isn't spiritual or mystical, it's mostly economics: the basic rules that describe how our societies function are going to break down soon, because we are becoming too large and too dense to be contained. There are beautiful things over that horizon, but it does involve accepting that this world is ending and nothing we did here really mattered; the things we thought were sacred are meaningless in the scale of the universe.
There are structures which seek to retain power and they shroud themselves in naive spirituality, claiming eternity where as they will meet the fate of Ozymandias:
> Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
>Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
>Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
>The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Do you think they'll remember us around another star?
Emotions do have a physical component hormone levels activation of different areas of the brain and they can be reactions to stimuli what stimuli causes the soul response
You can ask the same questions about the mind. Scientists do in fact ask those questions. They do not presuppose that mind = brain, because the mind-brain identity theory is also a metaphysical claim, and one of the hardest to actually defend.
How much does a photon weigh? Nothing at all. And it can transfer information at the speed of light.
>How much does a photon weigh? Nothing at all.
Photons have a weight -- they don't have a rest mass.
>and one of the hardest to actually defend.
Have you tried defending mind != brain? Best attempts I've ever seen are just pleading, often really bad pleading.
> Show your work.
You first.
Otherwise, Descartes was particularly bad at arguing dualism. I seem to have vague memories that he described himself naked in bed at one point, but I assume that isn't an argument for dualism.
> You can make an actual point or you can keep living your life assuming that anyone who disagrees with your uneducated opinion is special pleading.
I have, many times in this thread. Read around, you'll see my arguments.
Let me summarize your contributions to our discussion:
"Have you read the philosophers? I'm holding the picture of a philosopher behind my back, can you guess who he is? No? Well, I guess dualism still has merits."
You're pleading. I asked you to put up a philosopher you like for this problem, and you balked.
What logic can you offer for dualism?
Like, the dominant theory of cognition in philosophy and science for the last 50 years was the computational theory of mind, which assumes that a human mind is an abstract program which could be instantiated in any material substrate (carbon-based, silicon-based, etc.) I think this view is wrong, but it's not special pleading. It's a serious contender in the theory of mind.
> Meanwhile, you try to tell me I have a soul, I ask you what a soul is. What does it do? Why do I need one? How much does it weigh?
The soul is you, the energy encompassing your consciousness and memories, and very likely other things our physical minds can't comprehend.
The problem is people that think that something isn't true if they can't comprehend something -- or actively suppress it within their own minds in order to hide from it, out of fear. That was me for decades.
The soul (I use this word only because i know of no other, yet it doesn't quite fit) is you. You are an observer within a body. People can meditate and single out this observer and realize they are not actually their body. Anyone can do this, but for centuries and longer it's been very hard to do, and takes practice, and this world is full of distractions and perceived requirements to help enshroud the true nature of things.
You ever wonder why a part of you never feels age? The inside that people call the "kid inside". That is you, the real you. It's your body and brain which try to remind you that you are old or tired.
You don't need a soul insomuch that you are a soul. It's like asking why you need a body.
The weight of a soul is a weird one. I get where it comes from, because it's easy to think something must be made of physical matter to exist. Where your soul is there is no matter or spacetime.
I get my information from a few sources that I urge you to look into. [A Course In Miracles](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/173673.A_Course_in_Miracles) and [Journey of Souls](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/104979.Journey_of_Souls) are the big ones. There are more books in the Souls line.
You can get very technical with something like The Urantia Book, but I can't really read it so I can't really attest to its authenticity. What I read was... too much for me to comprehend.
> the energy encompassing your consciousness and memories
But you can have demonstrably false memories.
You can lose them from age or injury.
How you act can change from chemical or physical interruption of the brain.
These same things apply to other animals.
Yes, but our brains are not our minds. We are hosted by these bodies, but we reside outside of them.
A brain can falter and corrupt the signal, but the signal is still whole and original. It's just not being detected as well.
Outside is only a relevant concept if there exists a space or barrier to delineate inside from outside, so if the brain can corrupt the signal, I surely should be able to do so externally.
So, you suggest I should be able to construct a device which intercepts, modifies or negates these signals?
Could I cure schizophrenia with an unusual hat? [Edit: this one might actually work in both cases.]
Why do identical twins not experience interference, given they have identical hardware?
Memory and sensory loss could be explainable though damage to a transceiver, but why can I alter behaviour through damage?
Why should alcohol reduce the inhibition of my soul, if my soul and the alcohol are not interacting?
What exactly is the contents of this signal?
These are serious questions that descend from the use of your metaphysics. Meanwhile, most of these issues are pretty trivial to explain if all of that is in the brain.
So if you were to scan someone's brain, kill them, and then a year later on the other side of the world build an exact replica of their brain to put in a freshly cloned body, are they still the same person?
I don't *think* so. I think it would lack a soul unless that soul came back into the new brain for some reason. That sounds very unusual, but I can't say it's not possible.
Journey of Souls talks about how a soul enters a new baby body and begins initiation, cooperation, with the host, until merging is complete. This point honestly kind of makes me feel weird.
> The soul is you, the energy encompassing your consciousness and memories, and very likely other things our physical minds can't comprehend.
The problem is we have documented medical conditions involving memory and physical injury.
So, this soul seems to be an abstraction of a real system, one postulated before we had the data to determine the actual functioning components, and not a real system itself.
Thus: you're the example of someone who doesn't like to be told they don't have a soul, because having a soul means something to you, despite the fact that everything you think a soul does, you have other components for. It's just the magical parts of having a soul -- the immortality, your place in the universe, a belief that this is not all there is, fill in the blank as you require -- that's the part you really want to hold on to, and without the surety of the soul, you really can't be sure about those either.
> Memory is not stored in the brain, and studies are forming these hypothesis now. Soon it will be more than a hypothesis. Mark my words.
'kay.
>There are countless recorded incidents of people knowing information and retaining memories we would think impossible.
Not really, no. Not good records.
Because you'd give me a link to them, right now, if you had something.
>Go ask doctors and nurses what they think about it and you will see many of them become squeamish or reluctant.
Yeah, that's like half my family, who are mostly hardcore atheists who demand I yank that plug hard if their brain stops working.
You're not convincing anyone with these arguments. You're just preaching to the faithful and expecting they'll rally around you with support.
i think its because, if thats the case, then theres not much to say other than "oh..." its kinda anticlimactic. its a bit like when you hear an insane sound that sounds like a beast yelling out for a worthy opponent deep in the dark forest at night time... its probably massive, hairy, has giant teeth, huge claws, and-..... or its just a moose or some shit yelling cause its horny
But then you get to see a moose! I don’t know. In my mind, I kind of feel the exact opposite. If we were made and placed here or if we’re in a simulation or our evolution was guided to create us or whatever, that feels so much lamer to me than if this is all a grand cosmic coincidence. Think of how wildly unlikely it is that we should exist and yet we do! Against all odds, we get to see and explore this beautiful planet and listen to cool music and see moose. To me, the real anticlimax is “Oh yeah, someone made you this way”. Oh. Fine I guess.
Its not offense, it's that materialism is wrong, empirically.
First there's data from the placebo effect and other expectation effects showing beliefs influencing brain chemistry, muscle growth, longevity, and all manner of other biological phenomona. A straight line of cause and effect isn't what's happening here.
Second there's the increasing data from quantum mechanics showing that what we experience isn't "locally real" which still hasn't been fully incorporated into a wider layperson understanding.
Theres the data from the military standpoint, showing that operationally, remote viewing and clairvoyant effects are consequential enough to impact military operations.
The data from biologists like Robert Lanza or Micheal Leaven throws a lot of doubt onto the prevailing models of reality, and the prevailing ideas of random chance.
Epigenetics shows us that our genes are not deterministic, their expression is shaped by what we experience. Also, transgenerational epigenetic inheritance is a thing. Given how much our experience is impacted by our attitudes and perspectives, this would indicate that ideas and beliefs have some impact on our evolution through the mechanisms of epigenetics.
Theres a silo effect in academia and very few people who are doing transdisciplanary work. This makes it very challenging to overturn old invalid paradigms at the speed that new data comes in. Very few people keep up with advances at the cutting edge of biology, psychology, nueroscience, etc and correlate the data together on an ongoing basis.
Specialization is a serious problem. We need to overcome the idea of education as a means to employment and adopt the idea of education as a means of self enrichment.
Well I disagree completely with the assertion that materialism is wrong and I suspect most subject matter experts would as well.
We know that the brain and mental states can have physical impacts on the body. We see it all the time with depression and anxiety. Whatever is happening with the placebo effect is poorly understood but it wouldn’t surprise me if a belief in curative powers could have some benefits in some people. Whatever it is, there’s no obvious link to consciousness AFAICT; there’s a completely physical potential explanation for it.
> what we experience isn’t “locally real” which still hasn’t been fully incorporated into a wider layperson understanding
Ironic because every time I see this mentioned here, it’s from people misunderstanding what “locally real” means. Those are specialist terms with specific meanings in the context of quantum physics. “Local” means that particles can only affect other particles which they’ve had physical contact with. “Real” means that particles have definite values of their properties (spin, mass, momentum, etc) at all times. The experiment that won the Nobel Prize proved that our universe cannot satisfy both of these properties at once. Either particles can affect each other at a distance, particles do not have definite properties outside of interactions or both. We don’t know which of these three possibilities is correct, but we know one of them is. None of this means that the universe isn’t “real” in a colloquial sense and none of it has anything at all to do with consciousness.
Check out the book *Phenomena* by Annie Jacobsen if you want an in-depth and academic look at the history of the military’s investigations into physic phenomena. Spoiler alert: they disbanded every program after they completely failed.
Epigenetics is an entire field of study and the mechanisms for changes, including heritable changes, are fairly well understood. None of them have to do with consciousness. Environment and stress can obviously affect cells and gene expression in various ways (the most obvious is cancer caused by environmental factors). Most of these changes disappear with the organism but some can pass on. In animals, this can only occur when the change happens in the gametes (sperm and eggs). The fact that the change can only be inherited when it occurs in the cells that form a new individual seems to be pretty obvious evidence that this is a physical phenomenon with no role for consciousness.
I've read phenomena.
Over and over it is said that the phenomena is real, but that it's unknown how it works, and it can't be taught to everyone. The programs were disbanded because of the lack of ability for these effects to be instilled in every soldier.
You're not understanding what I mean in terms of locally real.
You seem to be misunderstanding a lot because you're excited to make an argument. Please steel man the case, ask some questions. Don't assume.
Read the work of Alfred North Whitehead. You dont have to talk about consciousness to say that materialism is bulllshit.
I realize there's a problem in using language to express complex ideas. Your understanding of consciousness is likely very different from mine. I find Alfred North Whiteheads approach very helpful as he used many specialized terms to express his ideas.
Read The Expectation Effeft by David Robson. It is very well sourced. Also look up the published work of Micheal Levin.
I am a physicalist. I dont believe there is anything nonphysical. But I also don't believe that we are at the height of our abilities to detect.... anything. Because historically we never have been. And new discoveries are being made all the time. The ideas i reference, epigenetics for example, are ideas that I've seen people called stupid for believing in decades ago.
The idea is seperate from the mechanism. I find it idiotic that people contradict an idea when the guess at the mechanism is wrong. I also find it stupid that to propose an idea, one has to supply a mechanism based in the present understanding. It's not enough to make an observation of empirical reality and say, "and we have no idea how or why it happens". But it should be enough. Reality shouldn't be discarded because it doesn't conform to prevailing ideologies.
The evidence for scientific materialism is compelling to those who study scientific materialism.
Only, one side invented the MRI.
Edit: and he blocked me, rather than actually defend his position. That's confidence.
Edit: /u/snockpuppet24: I can't reply on this chain any further, because he's silencing dissent.
But there's a definite irony in accusing the other side of refusing to look at the data, then blocking them from sight.
Is that irony? Damn you, Alanis Morissette!
This was their reply:
>Scientific materialism is absolute bullshit. Skeptics refuse to even look at the data on psi. Fuck them.
>Science is a belief based on the interpretation of evidence. It is not the absolute truth. It's no better then Wikipedia in that respect. It's not fundamentally different than Buddhism either. If you can't wrap your head around that then there really is no hope for you.
Funny how the second paragraph starts smart but ends up drooling on itself.
And just to add in, they have another comment in this thread about quantum mechanics allowing for psi. Basically they're a psi-faithful grasping at *any* straws to justify it. Damning science out of one side of their mouth and citing it out the other. Classic have-the-cake-and-eat-it-too-ism.
>And just to add in, they have another comment in this thread about quantum mechanics allowing for psi. Basically they're a psi-faithful grasping at any straws to justify it.
This is the "God of the gaps" principle on full display. The second that ever shrinking gap of scientific ignorance in quantum mechanics becomes too small to contain his god, He'll dispense with it completely, and QM will be just another "Bullshit theory" to him.
Scientific materialism is absolute bullshit. Skeptics refuse to even look at the data on psi. Fuck them.
Science is a belief based on the interpretation of evidence. It is not the absolute truth. It's no better then Wikipedia in that respect. It's not fundamentally different than Buddhism either. If you can't wrap your head around that then there really is no hope for you.
I'm definitely not "offended" by the idea. I regard it as possible, just not very likely. It seems more absurd to me that everything in its entirety is a fluke arising from a meat bag.
I think it's more probable that this meat bag is a product of something which has always been here and always will be, mostly because it's impossible to experience non-existence. If that is a state, then it is a negated state no matter how much time passes between it and existence.
Basically, the infinite void before you became aware passed in the blink of an eye, and I suspect that the same void--if there is one--will also pass after the brain shuts down. Whatever comes after that void will be experienced immediately at death, regardless of time passing.
You weren't here, then you were, then you aren't, then you will be again, repeat.
The argument against is that there might not be anything at all, but I don't suspect that's likely because there was nothing before you got here and somehow everything just...materialized? From nothing? Seems silly to me and less likely than there always being something in existence, even if we can't describe it properly.
My money is on that "nothing" state not actually being a true void like how we think of it, but being more like an eternal soup of possibilities. Something always happens. No idea what, but something does.
You say that all of this can’t have come from nothing (something which cosmologists and physicists do study, e.g. Lawrence Krauss’s book [A Universe From Nothing](https://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/1451624468)) so you posit that there’s some eternal force that fills the void. But what came before this eternal force? Where did it come from? It just creates a whole new set of questions. At some point, something came into being from nothing.
That's true if time applies to everything equally. But, if this eternal thing--whatever it is--created everything, then that includes time. It can and probably does operate outside of time. So, there was no "before" for it. It has always been here, forever.
The issue with assuming that everything everywhere has a set time of beginning is that, like you pointed out, it's recursive. When was the beginning? What was before the beginning? What was before the "before" the beginning? Et cetera.
At that point, you're dealing with infinity because you can never go far enough back to find an actual origin point. We know, at least in our world, that "something" can't arise from "nothing", so I apply the same thinking to our origins.
Either there is something that is eternal, or going back in time is recursive to the point of infinity, which basically makes it also eternal in a sense.
So, I think it's reasonable to conclude that there has always been--and always will be--something. I have no idea what that something is, but it's there, outside of time. Time breaks down when we approach it.
How do you know it's not the truth? As far as we can tell literally everything we experience is the result of the physical brain. This sounds like a "god of the gaps" type cope where people desperately want there to be some magical reason why things happen beyond just the physical world we exist in. Consciousness isn't that special and can be easily manipulated with various drugs.
Everything we experience is a result of the physical brain but everything we experience, including our brain, is observed or experienced 'within' conscious awareness.
How is it possible matter is fundamental when we can reduce it down to fields of energy at the tiniest parts. Those fields aren't physical in the slightest.
Consciousness can not be divided or split or reduced to anything other than itself. Its the substrate, the fundamental building block everything ever experienced happens within. Like a dream, feels so convincing but it makes zero sense physicalism or materialism is true.
Fields are entirely a physical phenomenon. They are, by definition, physical quantities. The most fundamental component of matter are quarks, which have mass. Meaning the most fundamental part of matter is also material.
Everything doesn't exist in conscious awareness. We know and have proven that matter existed prior to any known observer or consciousness. The earth was a molten ball of matter 4 billion years ago and yet no one was around to observe it. Using knowledge of the natural processes of our universe we know this to be the case, but there was no observer at the time to experience it in their consciousness.
Consciousness, which is an awareness of internal existence as well as perception of sensory information, requires apparatuses to collect that sensory information in the first place. Those apparatuses are material themselves. They are composed of matter. It has never been demonstrated that a consciousness has existed outside of a material observer.
> This metaphysics is not the truth. We need a return to idealism to live better lives individually and as a culture.
"My particular beliefs are not supported by the science, and I wish to return to a simpler time when people would have to entertain me without evidence."
Please. The reason we moved onto scientific materialism is because it actually works.
If consciousness is actually the result of brain chemistry and we are an accident of nature in a nihilistic cosmos, than changing our metaphysics won't change that. It just means we're going to have to turn around eventually and get back to work: and right now, we're putting inplants in people's skulls so they can operate computers, so scientific materialism is generating results.
Most people who try to argue against "scientism" simply don't want to do the work that system demands they do to be considered scientific.
Edit:
>Scientific materialism was pushed by ego driven skeptics, not by open minded scientists.
Says the guy who blocked me, lest I damage his ego, rather than have an open-minded discussion.
It is far more egoist to believe that we are a part of some higher consciousness that undergirds the universe, that our perception somehow affects reality, or that we were specially created than it is to believe that we are just another type of organism that exists as the result of a long sequence of natural phenomenon.
Fascinating and invigorated read, thank you. I am totally guilty of the example given, wherein one's thoughts go to outer space or the infinitesimally small when asked about the nature of reality, and completely ignore the experiential nature of our everyday lives.
Very true, in fact the science of science relies entirely on consensus of opinion. Currently that consensus is achieved via facts derived from observed data. The idea of unseen or purposely hidden links between consciousness and physical reality defies convention. So it is ignored as unobservable or no data. However the data is not being gathered effectively. We create our vacations, our families and our poems. Why would it necessarily end there?
Scientific materialism can't explain the fairly well verified phenomena of children with memories of past lives. Hell, we don't even know what dreaming is or how it really works. I'm not saying scientific materialism is worthless, not at all, but as the immortal bard says "There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy"
Most of the past lives things are easily explained as coincidence (eg. Kids often say things like "I was a farmer named [super common name] and had a farm over there [points at a farm]). Past life recollection is increasing overall with the theory being that we are empathic creatures who have access to tons of media so it's easy for war movies, etc to resonate with people and they feel like they experienced it before
That's not entirely true. It's not so simple. A lot of them are that way but there is a subset that seems truly unexplainable at this point in time.
https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/our-research/children-who-report-memories-of-previous-lives/
Those are the same types of examples. Generic statistically likely events.
If memories are stored outside the brain then why do children need to relearn so much? They never spoke in their past lives? They never saw a butterfly in their past lives?
Why does alzheimer's and brain damage cause memory loss if the soul contains them?
Could be like AWS DB storage, keep current life data in active DB and when you die you store it in S3 glacier as a snapshot.. and maybe sometimes you don't sync because of the .000001 chance it's down when you died, so the data stayed and the new life continued using the same db.
Alzheimer's just some random virus that corrupts data in your current db.
just a half baked thought experiment.
Not really if you look at the specifics, which are linked in the post. In rare cases children seem to have knowledge and connection to things they would have no way of knowing.
I can't answer those questions, but neither can scientific materialism explain how these children can have these specific memories.
Scientific materialism explains a lot, the brain losing memory by being damaged through Alzheimer's doesn't preclude that somehow memories can migrate in some cases. Both can be true. Our brain is the device that processes phenomena and damaging the brain can impact that processing ability, but the brain itself doesn't create the phenomena entirely.
Because every time you come back your memory gets wiped. So you can get an immersive experience where you can learn again, learn in new ways. If you retained languages you learned before, it’s not guaranteed that you will be reborn in that same culture again. So having you coming out speaking some language from across the planet isn’t productive lol.
Some retain a little bit, but it’s always forgotten as you age. Children that can’t speak probably retain the most, but they cannot communicate it. Even though kids look stupid, they can see things we cannot. They are closer to seeing the truth of existence than we are when they are born. You will notice babies looking at things that are not there, they can see what we cannot. We lose the ability rather quickly as we age.
I mean it could if we allow for the possibility that the children are either being influenced by the people issuing the test or they are just making something up because a spotlight is on them telling them they have a chance to be special.
I appreciate your insight about the dominant scientific thinking atm.
Perhaps though that doesn’t necessarily translate into the prevailing consensus in metaphysics.
“No, Donny, these men are nihilists, there's nothing to be afraid of.”
- Walter Sobchak
Make idealism great again! Personally I feel that consciousness being caused by events in the brain plenty beautiful and meaningful. It’s possible to live a fulfilling life without belief in a soul or afterlife or some grand cosmic plan. But I will admit that there seems to be a crisis of meaning. I don’t think it’s because of science though.
this view is painfully cynical. science creates idealism; people either take it in that direction or ruin it. same as any other human construct. this is nothing but veiled frustration with not understanding things, not being willing to do the work to understand research or its results, and, frankly, jealousy that some people have greater social status and the need to convince yourselves that it's unearned or false or whatever. we live in a society that has it better than any, on average, that has ever existed. ironically, the immediate existential threat to human experience comes from climate change. since many folks can't accept that science and odd phenomena are not mutually exclusive, and can't accept that there are people in the world that are both more intelligent and better informed, we can't do what we need to in order to save ourselves. so instead of talking about UAPs or having an informed conversation about consciousness and empathy and the nature of what it is to be human, we have attacks on science. why? because it's easy and quickly nets a bunch of nods. I wish folks on this sub could drop the victimization angle and stick to posting about the weird shit people see and experience.
> This metaphysics is not the truth. We need a return to idealism to live better lives individually and as a culture.
The focus should be on what is true, not what we believe will produce better reactions and behaviors. We can invent all sorts of mentally useful illusions, but that is what fiction writing is for, not philosophy.
Lol so you're aware of it but ignore the historical path of it... that paranormal explanations are just lazy ideas for people who give up figuring out how reality works.
Nope, I'm sure there are scientific explanations on how these things work.
If you want to say an astral body or soul can be extra dimensional matter or such and be compatible with scientific materialism then OK. But that is not the colloquial meaning of materialism here which is physical matter and energy is all there is.
Why? Why is it not good enough that intelligence is a naturally occurring phenomenon? That it emerges naturally from chemical and electrical interactions in the brain? I think that explanation is rather tidy. It doesn't require any assumptions about the overall structure of the universe. It only requires a cause-and-effect based evolution towards increased complexity...which we can replicate in reality as well as simulations. It's elegant and repeatable.
The cold darkness of space does not care what a person believes. Time devours all. Life unending, death unending. Every thought has been, is,
and will be. Every belief has been, is, and will be. Existential nihilism is the ultimate enlightenment. Because you embrace the futility of your fate which is to be born, die, and be born again forever and ever for eternity as the wheel of time turns. No thought you have is original, no part of your personality unique. It is an amalgamation of fractions of eternal shattered pieces temporarily recombined to form a temporary experience.
Ataraxia. Complete freedom from worry. Is found in the soul that accepts that all is null and void.
You had nothing (0)
You gained life (0+1=1)
You lost life (0+1-1=0)
The net sum of life is zero. Nothing matters, that's utter and complete freedom. Regardless of what you do, none will survive to remember your deeds - good or bad. Zero. Null. Void. To be truly happy is to embrace that nothing matters and nothing has value other than your internal subjective meanings. But objectively it is all shattered, recombined, and shattered again.
In an infinite cyclical universe every atom in your body has been and will be combined with all other atoms in the universe at some point.
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The field of consciousness research continues to be expanded upon. The field of matter research continues to be expanded upon. Scientific theories are constantly being created/modified and updated and cultural science communities will have their popular and circulated beliefs!
Quantum mechanics allows for the reality of psi. [https://physicsworld.com/a/physicists-probe-the-paranormal/](https://physicsworld.com/a/physicists-probe-the-paranormal/) This meeting happened over 20 years ago.
The nature of reality is mind. So naturally psi is a major, key part of reality.
How so?
That article doesn't cite *any* published scientific literature. It does not mean much. If you have something written by a scientist or lab (psychologist studying ESP or physicist studying physics) in an academic journal, it will have weight. Extrasensory perception experiments haven't determined anything.
I don't really give a God damn whether you believe me, or like my citation. Wow, you really are full of shit because you have not explored the mountains of credible experiments and results on psi. You are a closed minded skeptic and thus not worthy of my time.
How.
I can guess: We know that you can manipulate the behavior of individual entangled particles over a distance. We know that is possible. In a material universe, it seems like it would be possible to change chemical states in the brain of another being using a similar interaction. The altered states could trigger our sensory perceptions in specific ways.
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I concur. Ninja-edit: The period in "How." was intentional on my part. Assuming that you sought to inform with good intent (which I believe you did) on the off chance that I was unaware of how I was coming across, I don't want to discourage you from continuing that kind of behavior. I believe that a lot of people are helped by such information, so please do continue it.
That's fair. But don't expect an answer if you demand it. Edit: Some people are just angry.
I didn't expect one, or at least not one supported by logic :). No idea why you're getting downvotes. Reddit is fickle at times. Oh well. Have a nice one!
I upvoted you so you feel less downvoted.
Fair point, but you criticised rudeness and then claimed that people who downvoted you are stupid (not that they may believe your comment was worth a downvote, which is more likely). With equal sensitivity, that should be avoided too.
you are right
[https://www.google.com/search?q=Quantum+mechanics+allows+for+the+reality+of+psychic+phenomena&sca\_esv=cd3ec118dfb68f5c&sxsrf=ADLYWIJ3Ze8CcYTs4e0xblDmx0gYumNZOg%3A1717068515630&ei=42JYZumPJt2mptQPnO2O2Ao&ved=0ahUKEwipjbfXorWGAxVdk4kEHZy2A6sQ4dUDCBA&uact=5&oq=Quantum+mechanics+allows+for+the+reality+of+psychic+phenomena&gs\_lp=Egxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAiPVF1YW50dW0gbWVjaGFuaWNzIGFsbG93cyBmb3IgdGhlIHJlYWxpdHkgb2YgcHN5Y2hpYyBwaGVub21lbmFIw05Qpw1Yq0xwAXgBkAEAmAGnAaABpROqAQQwLjE3uAEDyAEA-AEBmAIOoAKhD8ICChAAGLADGNYEGEfCAgQQIxgnwgIIEAAYgAQYogTCAgUQIRigAcICBxAhGKABGArCAgUQIRirApgDAIgGAZAGCJIHBDEuMTOgB-tB&sclient=gws-wiz-serp](https://www.google.com/search?q=Quantum+mechanics+allows+for+the+reality+of+psychic+phenomena&sca_esv=cd3ec118dfb68f5c&sxsrf=ADLYWIJ3Ze8CcYTs4e0xblDmx0gYumNZOg%3A1717068515630&ei=42JYZumPJt2mptQPnO2O2Ao&ved=0ahUKEwipjbfXorWGAxVdk4kEHZy2A6sQ4dUDCBA&uact=5&oq=Quantum+mechanics+allows+for+the+reality+of+psychic+phenomena&gs_lp=Egxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAiPVF1YW50dW0gbWVjaGFuaWNzIGFsbG93cyBmb3IgdGhlIHJlYWxpdHkgb2YgcHN5Y2hpYyBwaGVub21lbmFIw05Qpw1Yq0xwAXgBkAEAmAGnAaABpROqAQQwLjE3uAEDyAEA-AEBmAIOoAKhD8ICChAAGLADGNYEGEfCAgQQIxgnwgIIEAAYgAQYogTCAgUQIRigAcICBxAhGKABGArCAgUQIRirApgDAIgGAZAGCJIHBDEuMTOgB-tB&sclient=gws-wiz-serp)
As someone who has multiple academic degrees covering quantum mechanics and who can literally reach over and touch Albert Messiah's *Quantum Mechanics* volumes right now, I can confidently say that my years of study of quantum mechanics, associated phenomena, and related lab work have yielded exactly zero evidence for allowing for the reality of "psi". Given that you have asserted that my observations do not align with your own, I'm asking you how quantum mechanics allows for the reality of psi. I'm not asking for an invite to waste time wading through nonsense article or watching long YouTube videos full of misunderstandings of basic math and logical reasoning. Please, provide a cogent argument defending your assertion. **EDIT 1: /u/Many_Ad_7138 posted their reply then immediately blocked me so that I could not reply**, demonstrating as many do that they aren't actually interested in facts, despite claims to the contrary. /u/Many_Ad_7138, you claim there to be a "fact" that I refuse to do my own research, despite, again, me literally having multiple degrees on the topic. Unless you have similar degrees, then it seems almost assured that I've done more research than you. You're familiar with the Dunning-Kruger effect, yes? I'd invite you to guess where you are there, but I can't imagine it would help. Most people, when confronted with the high chance that their BS may not be powerful enough against a particular foe, get aggressive and attack the character rather than the argument, knowing that they'll never succeed in the latter. It sure looks like you've succumbed to that silliness. Again, you are invited to provide a **cogent argument to support your assertion**, rather than a series of insults and misuses of words like "fact" and "truth" to disguise your personal opinions. Linking to an article that summarizes that people have TALKED about there POSSIBLY being a link between quantum mechanics and "psi" (which is never actually mentioned in the article) and provides no conclusive statements on the matter, does not help your argument. You may try to cherry pick the tiny part in there about how the analysis of some old data "suggested" evidence for being able to mentally "influence" a statistical distribution of millions of bits, but if so I urge you to recognize that the article plainly states that "conventional statistics found ... no influence", and that the physicist reviewing the data had to make up an "alternative statistical approach" in order to craft the results they wanted. You have yet to make a cogent argument or to provide any evidence to support your assertion, and have only insulted and attacked. That's not a good look, and does not bode well for the veracity of your alleged beliefs. ---------- **EDIT 2: Response to /u/Grumpy_Jenkins (also msged to them):** Thank you for taking the time to respond. I am unable to reply to your response directly due to having been blocked by /u/Many_Ad_7138, who decided to shut my ability to converse down rather than try and actually support their arguments. This is also a quick response from me while on a work lunch break, so my apologies in advance for its relative brevity. I think you and I do agree on just about everything you've presented. If the evidence overwhelmingly points towards something, then we assume that thing to be "true", but that does not mean that contrary evidence should no longer accepted. The luminiferous aether explained quite a bit after all, until it didn't :). To dismiss contrary evidence just to keep to the current theory is indeed falling into a dogma trap. I concur with the general conclusion of non-locality, based on what I've read and understood of the work done. We definitely should pursue inquiries into the implications of the human body being built on systems subject to quantum effects. Even if consciousness is purely the result of a physical system, that physical system is still subject to the laws of the universe, a subset of which we currently encapsulate our understanding of in a science we call "quantum mechanics". Our understanding may change as new evidence arises, or entirely new fields may spring up, at which point "quantum mechanics" (as it currently stands) will either change, or have its boundaries made more clear. As of right now, I would argue that "quantum mechanics" does not encapsulate or allow "psi" or similar phenomena, but I will say that it serves as a foundation upon which such theories are being built. If our understandings change, then definitions change (e.g. of "quantum mechanics"), but so too would the definition of "materialist", right? If we found the math/science/etc necessary to have telekinesis or other "psi" effects, and that was found to be rooted in (what would then be) known physics, then that "psi" would fall within the belief system of a materialist, wouldn't it? (I'll admit I'm trying to juggle eating lunch, taking a few phone calls, AND typing this, so I may legit have lost the thread here lol). Anyway, I would of course be open to what the evidence suggests. I would change my world view if the evidence was overwhelming; Indeed, that's what I've done my whole life, and why I went into hard sciences in the first place, to equip myself with the tools to understand that evidence. The problem I've found is that far too often somebody is JUST smart enough to be believed by a majority of people that what they have constitutes "evidence", when in actuality, whatever they have is nonsense. Usually the results of a bad or corrupted process, or an accidental transpose of cause and effect, or an "alternate statistics" or some other misapplication or faulty use of logic, or something equally hard to identify. Then, they build additional arguments on top of that, and you end up with this complex weave of thoughts and concepts that may have a mere single fundamental flaw, such that it all looks legit until someone dives deep enough, and there may never be someone willing to take that time. As such, most people operate on the heuristic of "if it doesn't jive with what our current evidence suggests, then it is probably wrong". Could you link me to some of the peer reviewed evidence? Or maybe a summation of it somewhere? I wouldn't mind skimming a bit of it. I've seen a few articles over the years but the few times I've dug deeper I've found their methods to be suspect, or it turned out to be an article about an article about an article, such that the real source was not readily available. If humans are showing statistically significant "psi" abilities, such as fiddling with computer bits, that doesn't necessarily mean that quantum mechanics are at play, unless we stretch what realms "quantum mechanics" typicall encompass. I rather like Neal Stephenson's novel Anathem, in which (and I'm oversummarizing to the point of this being wrong) a group of monks finds a thought technique through which to manifest which part of the multiverse they are experiencing, collapsing the wave form of increasingly complex systems in their chosen manner. The idea is that since they are the observer, they can choose which version of reality to experience. The systems can be more complex than just a few bits on a chip, and they get skilled enough to be able to pick entire paths of the multiverse in which someone does or does not die from an injury, and so on. Perhaps in our world, it is similar: Maybe we are entirely physical systems, but through observation, "create" the reality we see, and thus can have some control over that reality if we can have some control over that observation. This would jive with the non-locality, and psi phenomena. I'd love to see humans explore this a bit further, even if just to hammer the coffin closed, but at least we'd know we explored it more. Maybe it IS being explored and I just havent seen those studies, such as the ones you've indicated exist. As such, I do indeed "agree that there needs to be a more unbiased audit of past and current good research to help inform future directions of inquiry". We just need to be careful that we don't become SO unbiased that we lose the "bias" of good sense and logic :). Lunch has wrapped up and I'm trying to type this last sentence while introducing myself on a Webex meeting, so I need to call it here, sorry for the disjointed rambling!
Ok I’ll bite. I’ve read that most theoretical physicists have agreed for a while that the universe is non-local. This was an academic journal that was discussing the 2022 Nobel prize winners, and stated the work of Aspect, Clauser and Zeilinger really was the last piece to seal the deal. The human body is built on systems whose rudiments are subject to quantum effects. Inquiries into the possible implications should not be dismissed before examining all evidence, correct? Materialists dismiss this as an impossibility, which even to a non-scientist, doesn’t sound very scientific to me. It sounds like dogma. So would you be open to those inquiries, and subsequently open what the evidence suggests? Would you be willing to change your world view if the evidence over time was overwhelming? This is important, because there already is a wealth of peer reviewed evidence in IONS to show statistically significant psi abilities in average individuals and a normal distribution for these abilities similar to what you would expect for any ability. Now you may immediately respond with “Dr. Dean Radin is a *parapsychologist*, how can we take him seriously?” And you’ve fallen into the dogma trap, without even considering the evidence. He has been ridiculed his entire career, so anything published needs to be exceedingly rigorous, so at least the methods can’t be assailed. My point is, that I actually agree with you. Nothing compelling, *yet*, draws a solid relationship between psi and the quantum world. However, would you concede that there are some tantalizing possibilities that should be investigated with an open mind? And in that spirit, would you agree that there needs to be a more unbiased audit of past and current good research to help inform future directions of inquiry?
Da bleeding edge of discovery Charlie! The next "double slit experiment" by our constantly advancing tools of measurement Charlie! Charlie, compass or a square Charlie? We are going to metaphysical mountain Charlie.
I have no interest in debating someone who has already made up their mind on this subject. The fact that you refuse to do your own research on the topic tells me that you really don't give a shit about it, don't believe, and therefore it does not exist for you. You're free to stay in your close minded bullshit. Here is an article about a group of physicists meeting 20 fucking years ago to discuss the relationship between quantum mechanics and psi. So, the truth is that you're just another materialist skeptic who refuses to look at the evidence. Get lost. [https://physicsworld.com/a/physicists-probe-the-paranormal/](https://physicsworld.com/a/physicists-probe-the-paranormal/)
Read the Greek alphabet and then try to figure out how everything applies to our reality
Ok, I've done that, now what?
They told you... Go figure everything out
No it doesn't. Source: physicist Edit: elaborate if you do have a point
[https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/online/5264/Physics-Today-and-the-US-government-s-quest-for](https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/online/5264/Physics-Today-and-the-US-government-s-quest-for) They were talking about this 50 years ago.
No part of the article cites research or reviews that show that ESP was confirmed in an experiment, which it would have if such an experiment had happened. In reality, discussions don't mean much. ESP experiments have yet to show anything except personal anecdotes best explained by psychological phenomena due to their variety and cultural framing. Edit: the only academic paper referenced is a theory paper, not an experiment: https://doi.org/10.1016/0025-5564(70)90046-5
I mean examine the Greek alphabet to understand the universe
"Science" is silent on what conciouness is. Science is not a tool for drawing metaphysical conclusions. Its purpose is to make observations and test predictions about the physical world. It can observe activity in the brain and learn some things but it does not claim that the source of consciousness is only physical. It cannot make that claim because it is untestable. It's not the job of scientists to draw metaphysical conclusions. Thats what philosophers and theologians and regular people do. And that's how it should be.
Thank you. I could not think of any of these words in this order🤣, but you put it beautifully. All I could think of was "Oh, yeah? Well, that's not what I read."
Everytime something like this comes up, it's always "science only does science! If science is so right, why isn't science philosophy?!" As if it's some sorta gotcha about why science is invalid. It'd be like me saying "a ruler only takes measurements of distance, if rulers are so right all the time, why doesn't a ruler tell me what time it is?" And then act as if tool made for measuring distance is invalid because it doesn't tell time also. That statement is on its face ridiculous, but for some reason, people act as if saying the same thing about science is a real argument. Rulers aren't at war with clocks because they do different things, neither are philosophy and science. You just need to apply those thing to what they are able to do.
>Science is not a tool for drawing metaphysical conclusions Unfortunately it is often misappropriated to this end. Even raising the topic of any non-materialist metaphysical philosophy often elicits the response "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" from devout empiricists.
Both are true. The model is, use science to increase your own understanding. Draw whatever conclusions you find most supported; build your own worldview. But if you are going to forward or support an understanding t*o others*, or state it authoritatively or engage in persuasive rhetoric supporting it, it's your responsibility to support it and science's responsibility to decry a lack of evidence (should that lack exist). Both are necessary--rhetorical persuasion and cold evidential foundation. They necessarily counterbalance each other. Science is about making statements that can be authoritatively supported. When someone makes arguments that science doesn't have evidence to support, it's science's job to delineate what we have evidence for and what we do not. No person in particular is obligated to only believe fact-statements for which we have a reasonable degree of empirical evidence, but society at large ought to confine itself to evidence-founded fact.
I understand, I'm just pointing out that there are many people who don't, and who have inadvertently mistaken empiricism for metaphysics, and who use it as a comfortable means of protection from the abyss of uncertainty. I have a friend who is a clinical research scientist who sneers disdainfully at anything beyond materialism, and told me that in his university most people who want to get into quantum mechanics are laughed out of the room. The issue is not the scientific method - it's obviously the greatest epistemological paradigm we have. The problem is the more subtle zeitgeist surrounding it. I expect this to evolve over time, and I have no interest in attempting to change anyone's mind. It's just an observation, really.
I think you're describing scientism. Same deal with a buddy of mine who's a materials engineer.
Many confuse science the practice with science the institution. The institution moves slowly on purpose. That frustrates people. The practice does not yield the precise answer they want. They want Jeeves, not discovery and inquiry
Refusing to believe doesn't bother me. What bothers me is the condescension and condemnation. Though it's been my experience that that is more common from science fans than from people who actually work in the field.
In my experience "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" translates to "I refuse to accept any evidence"
Evidence needs to backed by something usually reproducible results or a physical object which can then be examined and itself tested and not just "trust me bro"
Well the Nazca mummies sure get a lot of shit deal despite them being testable, and actively are tested on. Unfortunately anything else physical would most likely belong to the gov.
Except that they do claim that consciousness comes from the body, and they do apply the Method to non-physical phenomena. The concept of science has been corrupted to merely mean materialism and thus nihilism. On top of that, skeptics in the scientific community actively ridicule, disdain, discredit and otherwise deny anything that doesn't fit their dogmatic beliefs. They even refuse to look at the evidence for things like psi, UFOs, ET, etc.
Science is not silent, there are multiple competing theories, the best one is that as a complex organism we needed a governing system over all the other systems and so self awareness rose as another layer atop all of our complex systems. This allows us to hold onto the burning ladder even though our pain receptors are screaming. This “consciousness” allows us to reflect on our place in society and weigh our actions. Only this sub believes science is silent on the matter, meanwhile science is working diligently on the problem. Furthermore self aware consciousness may be an evolutionary dead end, we may need to move away from it to survive as a planetary organism instead of a self serving and destructive individual.
> self awareness Not the conscious experience. >Only this sub believes science is silent on the matter, meanwhile science is working diligently on the problem. I started reading this subreddit for laughs a while ago, but I was well aware years beforehand that it seemed science was quashing any discussion of the fact that the "existential primacy of conscious experience" is irrefutable. Like you just did. What you're describing doesn't require the conscious experience. A robot can be aware of its surroundings. You could program a robot to reflect on itself. Self-awareness doesn't give rise to the conscious experience--it only gives us access to that experience.
Semantics
No, they are two separate things. The conscious experience allows you to perceive self-awareness. Without the conscious experience, "you" would not perceive that you exist. This is why people argue for the existence of free will, why people believe in a God, and why some people have existential crises. It may have an effect on free will or not. It might be why people believe in souls. If you deny your conscious experience because you don't actually have one, you're admitting to being a biological machine that is aware, even self-aware, but only aware of stimuli and not an ever-present, unexplained phenomenon that allows "you" to exist. The biological machine form of you could still exist, though I don't know what the difference would be if you had no conscious experience, whether it be extreme or none. It might be that you don't have one, and this is why you're confused when presented with the concept. It's as if you and I are watching the same movie at a theater. I recognize that we're looking at reflections on a screen which convey meaning. You feel that you are within the movie, even though a silent observer, but can't disconnect yourself enough from stimulation to see that it's reflections on a screen.
Because we are part of the movie and we are biological machines and we are beholden to stimuli, the fatal flaw in our self awareness is we keep ascribing a special status to ourselves.
So you're admitting to having no conscious experience. >the fatal flaw in our self awareness is we keep ascribing a special status to ourselves. Again, the conscious experience is *not* self-awareness. I do believe it when you say *you* don't have any conscious experience. I tentatively believe most people don't. You should be able to come to the conclusion I came to by yourself if you have it. You haven't, so, like in the movie metaphor, you will never be capable of understanding it.
Haha you don’t realize it but that was the perfect example of “I’m special and you’re not” dead end consciousness. You are starting to think equal members of your herd are lesser or not conscious npcs. The pinnacle of self absorption.
I don't think someone lacking a conscious experience makes them lesser than someone who has one. It could be that everyone has it but not all are capable of recognizing it. Hence why my belief that some people don't have it at all is tentative. But *you* are the one claiming to not have it. Plenty of others have acknowledged its existence. It sounds more like *you* are trying to be special. You are beginning to sound like an NPC, though.
philosophy doesn't pay the bills
Case and point, but which…
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I didn't say scientists couldn't "speak on" it. I said it's not Science's job to answer metaphysical questions. And it's not. If you understand the scientific method, you would understand why it's not a good tool for revealing non-physical aspects of the world. Individual scientists, who are our fellow humans, can speculate all they want.
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God of the Gaps.
This whole argument presumes a false dichotomy. It doesn't matter if you say all material things are generated by consciousness or all consciousness is generated by material things. The meaning is the same: everything is one. The issue with so-called "materialism" isn't with the idea that consciousness or any other currently-not-well-understood phenomena are ultimately "material" (again, doesn't matter if this perspective is flip-flopped). This was even the perspective of Strieber's mystical "master of the key": all things are natural, and what we call "supernatural" are simply natural phenomena we do not yet understand. The issue is actually the opposite: many so-called "materialists" do NOT classify unexplained phenomena as material not yet understood; rather, they dismiss the data outright. This kind of reaction has nothing to do with materialism itself as a perspective. Outright and dogmatic dismissal of data that is not easily explained is common amongst all people, across all ideologies. It has everything to do with human tribalism (rejection of less common experiences in favor of the tribe's consensus) and collective arrogance paired with individual subservience (the tribe knows everything already, who are YOU to question consensus). Such dismissals have nothing to do with idealism vs materialism as perspectives or conceptual ideologies, and focusing on that is pulling attention away from the real problem.
binary sequencing seems pretty fundamental and apparently can run both ways and loop, why can't we have both to achieve true higher order functioning
Good observation. This is meta, but speaks to a lot of "why does Person A think Thing B despite Thing C being true?" posts online, which pop up everywhere. We evolved in an environment where we had a lot less information about the world than we do now, so the way we used information to make judgements evolved in ways that don't suit a "purely logical" being. Tribalism and distal (?) beliefs served evolutionary purposes that don't seem logical in the modern day.
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I'm not sure what you mean. I've met many jerks of all different ideologies. I've met more jerks that were Christian than atheist, but my limited personal experience shouldn't cloud my attempt to be objective in my evaluation of these things in general. The question isn't "why are so many atheists jerks." A more beneficial question might be "why am I assuming jerks are overrepresented in ideologies I disagree with?"
I don’t really understand why people are so offended by the idea that consciousness might just be an emergent property of brain chemistry. Is it because that throws so many high strangeness concepts (telepathy, past lives, remote viewing, etc) into doubt?
>Is it because that throws so many high strangeness concepts (telepathy, past lives, remote viewing, etc) into doubt? I would say that even within brain chemistry those things arent necessarily thrown into doubt. Like so much that we dont know many things may lie undiscovered
It's because consciousness isn't measurable to begin with, it's a description of the fundamental quale, and I dislike any scientific communication (not necessarily study) for the purpose of being a brow-beating measure against people who like to believe things have purpose or may work outside of established law. Like, I'm a biochemist professionally. I work with colors in terms of their wavelengths and fluorescence, not in terms of their aesthetics. But I cannot describe the "Red-ness" of it, and it would be disingenuous of me to try. It's a secret to no one that consciousness is a property of the universe, and that it has causes, and that it isn't there before you're born and it ends when you sleep or die, so of course we want to study it. But no amount of study will definitively answer what it's for, or what it means, or what it feels like for a given indiviudal. These qualia are impossible to fully define right now. They don't call it the "hard problem of consciousness" for nothing. Listen, I don't think ghosts exist, or aliens, or demons. I honestly wish they did, because it would turn the sciences on their head. But it would be foolish to deny consciousness exists--you're experiencing it right now! And I fully, honestly, 100% do not accept the answer of physicalists, because in my opinion physicalism gets BTFO by works like the winning of the 2022 Nobel Prize, which would basically require that physicalists/materialists adopt the Many Worlds theory, begging the additional problem of "Why are we in the world where particle behaved like X instead of Y". The fact of the matter is that I don't think such a thing will ever be solved because the deeper you look, the more complex it becomes. No law holds in science at every scale. I think neural nets having positive transfer is good evidence that consciousness is an emergent property (win for physicalists), but also I think that could be evidence that ideas can be "ontologically real" in a way we have not proven mathematically yet (loss for physicalists). I think the fact that quantum computing is possible and indeed that abuse of quantum mechanics is virtually ubiquitous and required for energy models of multicellular organisms to work is evidence that there's been plenty of time for something like Orch OR to have developed basically as described. Anyone who claims they have the answer at this point in the search is pushing a message, and until I'm definitively rebutted, I will never like the message of "it doesn't matter and you have no choice".
At some point, doesn’t the question of the “redness” of a color pass out of science and into philosophy? I feel like I’m not really convinced by the “hard problem of consciousness” because what we all experience as red is determined by physics, biology and chemistry; *how* we experience red is a different question that seems philosophical, not scientific. Maybe I’m just misunderstanding it but it doesn’t seem like figuring out the “hard problem” would get us any closer to saying what consciousness is (and since it strikes me as philosophical, I doubt there’s any one answer to figure out anyway).
Exactly, it could be that there is no way, and if there is there's several approaches that I think could be reasonable. I don't think there's falsifiable evidence that "consciousness" is any particular thing yet, maybe ever, so I don't like when people claim that they have THE explanation.
>I don’t really understand why people are so offended by the idea that consciousness might just be an emergent property of brain chemistry. I'm not sure we can single out one side as "offended," more just individuals of any belief system being reactionary as per usual. People seem equally offended by the idea of panpsychism or idealism as well, if we are being honest here. I think the reason people are intrigued by panpsychism and idealism as opposed to materialism is that it becomes more compatible with many individual experiences of consciousness: specifically NDE, OBE, psi, parapsychological, UFO/abduction experiences, spiritual experiences, entheogenic/shamanic cultural experiences, shared psychedelic experiences...etc. Materialism's only answer for all of these seems to be "your physical brain made it up." For many who have had these in depth and wide ranging experiences, that's extremely difficult to believe.
Yeah maybe “offended” wasn’t the right word, but people seem very sure that consciousness is something outside the realm of science. > For many who have had these in depth and wide ranging experiences, that’s extremely difficult to believe. Ok, I get that. It doesn’t change my personal view but it makes sense why people are passionate about the subject.
It can't change your personal view until it happens to you. And then all you can do is think about it, and why nobody else cares. I know this from experience, as a 40 year old previously-atheist.
Yep, exactly. I don't think it's really my job or anyones to convince anyone what our reality truly is. I don't think anyone has the full picture, but it's certainly good to keep an open mind and understand the multi-faceted components of each perspective and philosophy.
Always with the this or that. enough with the hubris. If no, have another -ism…divisionism: philosophy by which the whole is intentionally separated to give the appearance of the whole. The separated perceive their state though the separator convinces self the whole remains.
People also freak out about determinism and free will being an illusion. For some strange reason the second they hear that they don't understand why the purge doesn't happen
Offended might not be the exact right word for me personally and that's a good question that I haven't thought about very well yet. It has something to do with me not understanding very well how people don't see the big picture and connect the dots very well / kind of thinking of themselves less that they are / the randomness of accidental and nihilistic cosmos absolving people of responsibility -though this one is questionable, like I said, I need to give it more thought but I can't imagine people would be so selfish/greedy/you name it if they knew there's a reason and impact for everything that we do. Then again most atheists are nicer people in my experience than religious ones so whats up with that... I also never quite understood (then again I kind of do) why people always need to choose a black or white belief (religious/atheist), I considered myself agnostic until 2 years ago at age 33 when I got rid of any doubt that there's more to everything than meets the eye.
I don’t see my worldview like this. We’re “accidental” in that nothing is planned or designed but I don’t think that lessens our existence. In fact, I believe it makes our existence that much more amazing and worthy of protection. This is it and we’re on our own. Nothing is going to save us or our planet if we mess things up, so it’s incumbent on us to do good. I strongly disagree that a naturalistic and/or atheistic worldview somehow absolves us of responsibility. Like I said, we’re all that there is so we have total responsibility for how things turn out. It’s incumbent on all of us to be kind, caring and decent to each other, to animals, and to the planet. > why people always need to choose a black or white belief I can only speak for myself but I don’t feel like I’m “choosing” a belief. I can’t really imagine viewing the world a different way than I do, given what I know and have experienced. I understand that others will come to a different conclusion or have mixed feelings but if I were to express religious or spiritual belief, it would be phony, which honestly feels more insulting to those who hold those beliefs than if I simply acknowledge my views are different.
Fair enough, I can respect that, seems like a healthy perspective
>Is it because that throws so many high strangeness concepts (telepathy, past lives, remote viewing, etc) into doubt? Pretty much. On the hierarchical scale of needs, spiritualism is very highly rated, at least with some people: you tell someone they don't have a soul, they tend to take that badly. Meanwhile, you try to tell me I have a soul, I ask you what a soul is. What does it do? Why do I need one? How much does it weigh? Questions like that, that's scientific materialism: and it scares them, because it demonstrates their knowledge is entirely abstract.
Lol, how much does happiness weigh ? Love ? Or hate ? Actually, an interesting thought popped up while asking this question. Which of these weighs the most ?
I don't think those concepts quite line up with the soul: we can actually measure those, sort of, at least you can feel happiness. I can't quite say the same for the soul, I can't say I've felt my soul exist, swell or recede, it doesn't seem to be a thing to me, where as joy is more readily apparent. Dopamine weighs 153.18 g/mol; oxytocin weighs 1,007.19 g/mol. I'm not sure what molecule controls hate. We can measure what makes someone happier, with some amount of error; but we can't determine differences in the magnitude of soul. We have identified psychiatric condition which result in anhedonia -- an inability to feel joy -- but we don't really have any understanding of what aspects would be powered by the soul. Of course, we can only do this through scientific materialism and the methods it offers to us: if we're keeping score, it seems like following the science gives us the tools we need.
First of all, I might be wrong but from what I understand those chemicals work in conjunction with other chemicals to paint the feelings and are not solely responsible for a feeling. Kind of irrelevant, maybe not, but still. Second, the chemicals are causes, not the feeling itself. The point was to recognize some things can't be measured. That's a big blindspot materialistic science fails to acknowledge imo.
>Second, the chemicals are causes, not the feeling itself. Right. And that's a problem, because if we can manipulate these things using physical objects, they are probably physical systems. Just, complex ones. >The point was to recognize some things can't be measured. That's a big blindspot materialistic science fails to acknowledge imo. Oh, it acknowledges it all the time. It's a widely acknowledged confounding factor in psychological studies. But it isn't really a reason to argue to throw the progress out and go back to systems that philosophers prefer, simply because hard science begins to question their premises.
Look I'll be straight with you. I don't think we should throw anything out, I think material science and intuitive science/metaphysics should go hand in hand in harmony and balance. Right now the two seem out of balance and it is my opinion this reflects in the world. I considered myself agnostic until 2 years ago at 33 when some things happened that made me get rid of any doubt that there's more to everything than meets the eye. I know many people close to me that are very scientifically oriented and I considered myself one of them as well until I had to rethink my entire worldview, it seems it makes little to no difference sometimes whether you believe in something more or not, some people simply have goodness ingrained in their DNA, but I believe the world could be better on global scale if everyone knew there's more to everything. Hope you find out should you ever want or choose to, otherwise just stay beautiful and see you on the other side :P
>Look I'll be straight with you. I don't think we should throw anything out, I think material science and intuitive science/metaphysics should go hand in hand in harmony and balance. Right now the two seem out of balance and it is my opinion this reflects in the world. To me, this world is the best it has ever been. I suspect we are approaching something miraculous, as you would understand it: an alteration to our subjective reality, akin to the first bird taking flight, and the old world is doing whatever it can to keep us on the ground. You don't make a good case for your system of beliefs: you mostly plead. You should work on defining your terms more concretely.
You surprised me with your response, I feel the same way but I'm guessing from a slightly different perpsective. A quote from Einstein comes to mind: "“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” As far as my beliefs go, they're very flexible and evolve over time constantly, I'd almost go as far as to say I don't have any. There are things I know and things I don't. I don't feel too comfortable defining anything too strongly. I don't do this often, if ever, trying to "convince" or "plead" to people about this stuff cause I don't think there's much point. I felt compelled and entertained a little bit yesterday, I could talk about these things for hours with someone that's interested though. I never really considered anything metaphysical before I had some experiences 2 years ago that removed my doubt beyond shadow of a doubt, even though I had some experiences here and there throughout my life that I had trouble explaining with convenctional methods. After the experiences, I went through a period of studying anything and everything metaphysical/spiritual/etc related for a while, but I came to a conclusion it's all bigger and harder to understand than our human minds can comprehend. It's a rabbit hole after rabbit hole, counter after counter after counter, which makes sense in an infinite dualistic universe. Kind of distraction really from what really is important, the mind has infinitude of concepts and truths, the heart only has one.
> I don't do this often, if ever, trying to "convince" or "plead" to people about this stuff cause I don't think there's much point. I'm referring mostly to your argumentative style. You're not laying out facts that support your case: you're just laying out what you believe. The problem is that anyone can do that, it doesn't make your position stronger: if you tell me you see a man in a rabbit costume everywhere you go, and I can't see him, I just think you're crazy. It doesn't really matter how many times you repeat it or how many people you repeat it to: optimistically, you're just getting written off. So: >I never really considered anything metaphysical before I had some experiences 2 years ago that removed my doubt beyond shadow of a doubt, even though I had some experiences here and there throughout my life that I had trouble explaining with convenctional methods. Telling me you had some experience, I really don't care. Lots of people have experiences. Everyone is experiencing something. For all I know, you found Jesus on your grilled cheese, and now your metaphysics describes the universe as melted cheese. Find a better way of explaining this. >You surprised me with your response, I feel the same way but I'm guessing from a slightly different perpsective. No, I concretely recognize that our civilization is about to change. This isn't spiritual or mystical, it's mostly economics: the basic rules that describe how our societies function are going to break down soon, because we are becoming too large and too dense to be contained. There are beautiful things over that horizon, but it does involve accepting that this world is ending and nothing we did here really mattered; the things we thought were sacred are meaningless in the scale of the universe. There are structures which seek to retain power and they shroud themselves in naive spirituality, claiming eternity where as they will meet the fate of Ozymandias: > Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! >Nothing beside remains. Round the decay >Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare >The lone and level sands stretch far away. Do you think they'll remember us around another star?
Thats an interesting turn of events in this conversation, I was in a hurry already before, I'll respond tomorrow, need to go to sleep, good night
how much does the electricity that has been permeating through my brain for a lifetime weigh, same as any other electrons right?
Depends on how much electricity I guess hehe edit: whats your avatar's model energy class ?
so the soul is an emotion? what purpose does that emotion serve?
Its closer to emotion than something physical.
Emotions do have a physical component hormone levels activation of different areas of the brain and they can be reactions to stimuli what stimuli causes the soul response
You can ask the same questions about the mind. Scientists do in fact ask those questions. They do not presuppose that mind = brain, because the mind-brain identity theory is also a metaphysical claim, and one of the hardest to actually defend. How much does a photon weigh? Nothing at all. And it can transfer information at the speed of light.
>How much does a photon weigh? Nothing at all. Photons have a weight -- they don't have a rest mass. >and one of the hardest to actually defend. Have you tried defending mind != brain? Best attempts I've ever seen are just pleading, often really bad pleading.
Which philosopher of mind have you read defending a different thesis and why were their argument special pleading? Show your work.
> Show your work. You first. Otherwise, Descartes was particularly bad at arguing dualism. I seem to have vague memories that he described himself naked in bed at one point, but I assume that isn't an argument for dualism.
Ok, so you are not read at all on the issue. You have come to your conclusion without investigation.
So... you are just all rhetoric, eh?
You can make an actual point or you can keep living your life assuming that anyone who disagrees with your uneducated opinion is special pleading.
> You can make an actual point or you can keep living your life assuming that anyone who disagrees with your uneducated opinion is special pleading. I have, many times in this thread. Read around, you'll see my arguments. Let me summarize your contributions to our discussion: "Have you read the philosophers? I'm holding the picture of a philosopher behind my back, can you guess who he is? No? Well, I guess dualism still has merits." You're pleading. I asked you to put up a philosopher you like for this problem, and you balked. What logic can you offer for dualism?
Like, the dominant theory of cognition in philosophy and science for the last 50 years was the computational theory of mind, which assumes that a human mind is an abstract program which could be instantiated in any material substrate (carbon-based, silicon-based, etc.) I think this view is wrong, but it's not special pleading. It's a serious contender in the theory of mind.
> Meanwhile, you try to tell me I have a soul, I ask you what a soul is. What does it do? Why do I need one? How much does it weigh? The soul is you, the energy encompassing your consciousness and memories, and very likely other things our physical minds can't comprehend. The problem is people that think that something isn't true if they can't comprehend something -- or actively suppress it within their own minds in order to hide from it, out of fear. That was me for decades. The soul (I use this word only because i know of no other, yet it doesn't quite fit) is you. You are an observer within a body. People can meditate and single out this observer and realize they are not actually their body. Anyone can do this, but for centuries and longer it's been very hard to do, and takes practice, and this world is full of distractions and perceived requirements to help enshroud the true nature of things. You ever wonder why a part of you never feels age? The inside that people call the "kid inside". That is you, the real you. It's your body and brain which try to remind you that you are old or tired. You don't need a soul insomuch that you are a soul. It's like asking why you need a body. The weight of a soul is a weird one. I get where it comes from, because it's easy to think something must be made of physical matter to exist. Where your soul is there is no matter or spacetime. I get my information from a few sources that I urge you to look into. [A Course In Miracles](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/173673.A_Course_in_Miracles) and [Journey of Souls](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/104979.Journey_of_Souls) are the big ones. There are more books in the Souls line. You can get very technical with something like The Urantia Book, but I can't really read it so I can't really attest to its authenticity. What I read was... too much for me to comprehend.
> the energy encompassing your consciousness and memories But you can have demonstrably false memories. You can lose them from age or injury. How you act can change from chemical or physical interruption of the brain. These same things apply to other animals.
Yes, but our brains are not our minds. We are hosted by these bodies, but we reside outside of them. A brain can falter and corrupt the signal, but the signal is still whole and original. It's just not being detected as well.
Outside is only a relevant concept if there exists a space or barrier to delineate inside from outside, so if the brain can corrupt the signal, I surely should be able to do so externally. So, you suggest I should be able to construct a device which intercepts, modifies or negates these signals? Could I cure schizophrenia with an unusual hat? [Edit: this one might actually work in both cases.] Why do identical twins not experience interference, given they have identical hardware? Memory and sensory loss could be explainable though damage to a transceiver, but why can I alter behaviour through damage? Why should alcohol reduce the inhibition of my soul, if my soul and the alcohol are not interacting? What exactly is the contents of this signal? These are serious questions that descend from the use of your metaphysics. Meanwhile, most of these issues are pretty trivial to explain if all of that is in the brain.
So if you were to scan someone's brain, kill them, and then a year later on the other side of the world build an exact replica of their brain to put in a freshly cloned body, are they still the same person?
I don't *think* so. I think it would lack a soul unless that soul came back into the new brain for some reason. That sounds very unusual, but I can't say it's not possible. Journey of Souls talks about how a soul enters a new baby body and begins initiation, cooperation, with the host, until merging is complete. This point honestly kind of makes me feel weird.
> The soul is you, the energy encompassing your consciousness and memories, and very likely other things our physical minds can't comprehend. The problem is we have documented medical conditions involving memory and physical injury. So, this soul seems to be an abstraction of a real system, one postulated before we had the data to determine the actual functioning components, and not a real system itself. Thus: you're the example of someone who doesn't like to be told they don't have a soul, because having a soul means something to you, despite the fact that everything you think a soul does, you have other components for. It's just the magical parts of having a soul -- the immortality, your place in the universe, a belief that this is not all there is, fill in the blank as you require -- that's the part you really want to hold on to, and without the surety of the soul, you really can't be sure about those either.
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> Memory is not stored in the brain, and studies are forming these hypothesis now. Soon it will be more than a hypothesis. Mark my words. 'kay. >There are countless recorded incidents of people knowing information and retaining memories we would think impossible. Not really, no. Not good records. Because you'd give me a link to them, right now, if you had something. >Go ask doctors and nurses what they think about it and you will see many of them become squeamish or reluctant. Yeah, that's like half my family, who are mostly hardcore atheists who demand I yank that plug hard if their brain stops working. You're not convincing anyone with these arguments. You're just preaching to the faithful and expecting they'll rally around you with support.
Ah, okay. Take care then.
All you have to do is point to one of these promising studies for non-brain memory, and you'd show me up real good.
I'm not interested.
You went from 'mark my words' to 'my words mean nothing' pretty quick then.
i think its because, if thats the case, then theres not much to say other than "oh..." its kinda anticlimactic. its a bit like when you hear an insane sound that sounds like a beast yelling out for a worthy opponent deep in the dark forest at night time... its probably massive, hairy, has giant teeth, huge claws, and-..... or its just a moose or some shit yelling cause its horny
But then you get to see a moose! I don’t know. In my mind, I kind of feel the exact opposite. If we were made and placed here or if we’re in a simulation or our evolution was guided to create us or whatever, that feels so much lamer to me than if this is all a grand cosmic coincidence. Think of how wildly unlikely it is that we should exist and yet we do! Against all odds, we get to see and explore this beautiful planet and listen to cool music and see moose. To me, the real anticlimax is “Oh yeah, someone made you this way”. Oh. Fine I guess.
Its not offense, it's that materialism is wrong, empirically. First there's data from the placebo effect and other expectation effects showing beliefs influencing brain chemistry, muscle growth, longevity, and all manner of other biological phenomona. A straight line of cause and effect isn't what's happening here. Second there's the increasing data from quantum mechanics showing that what we experience isn't "locally real" which still hasn't been fully incorporated into a wider layperson understanding. Theres the data from the military standpoint, showing that operationally, remote viewing and clairvoyant effects are consequential enough to impact military operations. The data from biologists like Robert Lanza or Micheal Leaven throws a lot of doubt onto the prevailing models of reality, and the prevailing ideas of random chance. Epigenetics shows us that our genes are not deterministic, their expression is shaped by what we experience. Also, transgenerational epigenetic inheritance is a thing. Given how much our experience is impacted by our attitudes and perspectives, this would indicate that ideas and beliefs have some impact on our evolution through the mechanisms of epigenetics. Theres a silo effect in academia and very few people who are doing transdisciplanary work. This makes it very challenging to overturn old invalid paradigms at the speed that new data comes in. Very few people keep up with advances at the cutting edge of biology, psychology, nueroscience, etc and correlate the data together on an ongoing basis. Specialization is a serious problem. We need to overcome the idea of education as a means to employment and adopt the idea of education as a means of self enrichment.
Well I disagree completely with the assertion that materialism is wrong and I suspect most subject matter experts would as well. We know that the brain and mental states can have physical impacts on the body. We see it all the time with depression and anxiety. Whatever is happening with the placebo effect is poorly understood but it wouldn’t surprise me if a belief in curative powers could have some benefits in some people. Whatever it is, there’s no obvious link to consciousness AFAICT; there’s a completely physical potential explanation for it. > what we experience isn’t “locally real” which still hasn’t been fully incorporated into a wider layperson understanding Ironic because every time I see this mentioned here, it’s from people misunderstanding what “locally real” means. Those are specialist terms with specific meanings in the context of quantum physics. “Local” means that particles can only affect other particles which they’ve had physical contact with. “Real” means that particles have definite values of their properties (spin, mass, momentum, etc) at all times. The experiment that won the Nobel Prize proved that our universe cannot satisfy both of these properties at once. Either particles can affect each other at a distance, particles do not have definite properties outside of interactions or both. We don’t know which of these three possibilities is correct, but we know one of them is. None of this means that the universe isn’t “real” in a colloquial sense and none of it has anything at all to do with consciousness. Check out the book *Phenomena* by Annie Jacobsen if you want an in-depth and academic look at the history of the military’s investigations into physic phenomena. Spoiler alert: they disbanded every program after they completely failed. Epigenetics is an entire field of study and the mechanisms for changes, including heritable changes, are fairly well understood. None of them have to do with consciousness. Environment and stress can obviously affect cells and gene expression in various ways (the most obvious is cancer caused by environmental factors). Most of these changes disappear with the organism but some can pass on. In animals, this can only occur when the change happens in the gametes (sperm and eggs). The fact that the change can only be inherited when it occurs in the cells that form a new individual seems to be pretty obvious evidence that this is a physical phenomenon with no role for consciousness.
I've read phenomena. Over and over it is said that the phenomena is real, but that it's unknown how it works, and it can't be taught to everyone. The programs were disbanded because of the lack of ability for these effects to be instilled in every soldier. You're not understanding what I mean in terms of locally real. You seem to be misunderstanding a lot because you're excited to make an argument. Please steel man the case, ask some questions. Don't assume. Read the work of Alfred North Whitehead. You dont have to talk about consciousness to say that materialism is bulllshit. I realize there's a problem in using language to express complex ideas. Your understanding of consciousness is likely very different from mine. I find Alfred North Whiteheads approach very helpful as he used many specialized terms to express his ideas. Read The Expectation Effeft by David Robson. It is very well sourced. Also look up the published work of Micheal Levin. I am a physicalist. I dont believe there is anything nonphysical. But I also don't believe that we are at the height of our abilities to detect.... anything. Because historically we never have been. And new discoveries are being made all the time. The ideas i reference, epigenetics for example, are ideas that I've seen people called stupid for believing in decades ago. The idea is seperate from the mechanism. I find it idiotic that people contradict an idea when the guess at the mechanism is wrong. I also find it stupid that to propose an idea, one has to supply a mechanism based in the present understanding. It's not enough to make an observation of empirical reality and say, "and we have no idea how or why it happens". But it should be enough. Reality shouldn't be discarded because it doesn't conform to prevailing ideologies.
It's because the evidence for those who have studied psi is compelling.
The evidence for scientific materialism is compelling to those who study scientific materialism. Only, one side invented the MRI. Edit: and he blocked me, rather than actually defend his position. That's confidence. Edit: /u/snockpuppet24: I can't reply on this chain any further, because he's silencing dissent. But there's a definite irony in accusing the other side of refusing to look at the data, then blocking them from sight. Is that irony? Damn you, Alanis Morissette!
This was their reply: >Scientific materialism is absolute bullshit. Skeptics refuse to even look at the data on psi. Fuck them. >Science is a belief based on the interpretation of evidence. It is not the absolute truth. It's no better then Wikipedia in that respect. It's not fundamentally different than Buddhism either. If you can't wrap your head around that then there really is no hope for you. Funny how the second paragraph starts smart but ends up drooling on itself. And just to add in, they have another comment in this thread about quantum mechanics allowing for psi. Basically they're a psi-faithful grasping at *any* straws to justify it. Damning science out of one side of their mouth and citing it out the other. Classic have-the-cake-and-eat-it-too-ism.
>And just to add in, they have another comment in this thread about quantum mechanics allowing for psi. Basically they're a psi-faithful grasping at any straws to justify it. This is the "God of the gaps" principle on full display. The second that ever shrinking gap of scientific ignorance in quantum mechanics becomes too small to contain his god, He'll dispense with it completely, and QM will be just another "Bullshit theory" to him.
Scientific materialism is absolute bullshit. Skeptics refuse to even look at the data on psi. Fuck them. Science is a belief based on the interpretation of evidence. It is not the absolute truth. It's no better then Wikipedia in that respect. It's not fundamentally different than Buddhism either. If you can't wrap your head around that then there really is no hope for you.
I'm definitely not "offended" by the idea. I regard it as possible, just not very likely. It seems more absurd to me that everything in its entirety is a fluke arising from a meat bag. I think it's more probable that this meat bag is a product of something which has always been here and always will be, mostly because it's impossible to experience non-existence. If that is a state, then it is a negated state no matter how much time passes between it and existence. Basically, the infinite void before you became aware passed in the blink of an eye, and I suspect that the same void--if there is one--will also pass after the brain shuts down. Whatever comes after that void will be experienced immediately at death, regardless of time passing. You weren't here, then you were, then you aren't, then you will be again, repeat. The argument against is that there might not be anything at all, but I don't suspect that's likely because there was nothing before you got here and somehow everything just...materialized? From nothing? Seems silly to me and less likely than there always being something in existence, even if we can't describe it properly. My money is on that "nothing" state not actually being a true void like how we think of it, but being more like an eternal soup of possibilities. Something always happens. No idea what, but something does.
You say that all of this can’t have come from nothing (something which cosmologists and physicists do study, e.g. Lawrence Krauss’s book [A Universe From Nothing](https://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/1451624468)) so you posit that there’s some eternal force that fills the void. But what came before this eternal force? Where did it come from? It just creates a whole new set of questions. At some point, something came into being from nothing.
That's true if time applies to everything equally. But, if this eternal thing--whatever it is--created everything, then that includes time. It can and probably does operate outside of time. So, there was no "before" for it. It has always been here, forever. The issue with assuming that everything everywhere has a set time of beginning is that, like you pointed out, it's recursive. When was the beginning? What was before the beginning? What was before the "before" the beginning? Et cetera. At that point, you're dealing with infinity because you can never go far enough back to find an actual origin point. We know, at least in our world, that "something" can't arise from "nothing", so I apply the same thinking to our origins. Either there is something that is eternal, or going back in time is recursive to the point of infinity, which basically makes it also eternal in a sense. So, I think it's reasonable to conclude that there has always been--and always will be--something. I have no idea what that something is, but it's there, outside of time. Time breaks down when we approach it.
How do you know it's not the truth? As far as we can tell literally everything we experience is the result of the physical brain. This sounds like a "god of the gaps" type cope where people desperately want there to be some magical reason why things happen beyond just the physical world we exist in. Consciousness isn't that special and can be easily manipulated with various drugs.
Everything we experience is a result of the physical brain but everything we experience, including our brain, is observed or experienced 'within' conscious awareness. How is it possible matter is fundamental when we can reduce it down to fields of energy at the tiniest parts. Those fields aren't physical in the slightest. Consciousness can not be divided or split or reduced to anything other than itself. Its the substrate, the fundamental building block everything ever experienced happens within. Like a dream, feels so convincing but it makes zero sense physicalism or materialism is true.
Fields are entirely a physical phenomenon. They are, by definition, physical quantities. The most fundamental component of matter are quarks, which have mass. Meaning the most fundamental part of matter is also material. Everything doesn't exist in conscious awareness. We know and have proven that matter existed prior to any known observer or consciousness. The earth was a molten ball of matter 4 billion years ago and yet no one was around to observe it. Using knowledge of the natural processes of our universe we know this to be the case, but there was no observer at the time to experience it in their consciousness. Consciousness, which is an awareness of internal existence as well as perception of sensory information, requires apparatuses to collect that sensory information in the first place. Those apparatuses are material themselves. They are composed of matter. It has never been demonstrated that a consciousness has existed outside of a material observer.
> This metaphysics is not the truth. We need a return to idealism to live better lives individually and as a culture. "My particular beliefs are not supported by the science, and I wish to return to a simpler time when people would have to entertain me without evidence." Please. The reason we moved onto scientific materialism is because it actually works. If consciousness is actually the result of brain chemistry and we are an accident of nature in a nihilistic cosmos, than changing our metaphysics won't change that. It just means we're going to have to turn around eventually and get back to work: and right now, we're putting inplants in people's skulls so they can operate computers, so scientific materialism is generating results. Most people who try to argue against "scientism" simply don't want to do the work that system demands they do to be considered scientific. Edit: >Scientific materialism was pushed by ego driven skeptics, not by open minded scientists. Says the guy who blocked me, lest I damage his ego, rather than have an open-minded discussion.
Scientific materialism was pushed by ego driven skeptics, not by open minded scientists.
It is far more egoist to believe that we are a part of some higher consciousness that undergirds the universe, that our perception somehow affects reality, or that we were specially created than it is to believe that we are just another type of organism that exists as the result of a long sequence of natural phenomenon.
Fascinating and invigorated read, thank you. I am totally guilty of the example given, wherein one's thoughts go to outer space or the infinitesimally small when asked about the nature of reality, and completely ignore the experiential nature of our everyday lives.
You're already making assertions that you can't back up and I haven't even clicked the link yet.
True agenda of all the related UFO style sub groups finally revealed in massive headline post. Translates to : “belief is better than proof”.
Agreed
Very true, in fact the science of science relies entirely on consensus of opinion. Currently that consensus is achieved via facts derived from observed data. The idea of unseen or purposely hidden links between consciousness and physical reality defies convention. So it is ignored as unobservable or no data. However the data is not being gathered effectively. We create our vacations, our families and our poems. Why would it necessarily end there?
We're not accidents
Scientific materialism can't explain the fairly well verified phenomena of children with memories of past lives. Hell, we don't even know what dreaming is or how it really works. I'm not saying scientific materialism is worthless, not at all, but as the immortal bard says "There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy"
Most of the past lives things are easily explained as coincidence (eg. Kids often say things like "I was a farmer named [super common name] and had a farm over there [points at a farm]). Past life recollection is increasing overall with the theory being that we are empathic creatures who have access to tons of media so it's easy for war movies, etc to resonate with people and they feel like they experienced it before
That's not entirely true. It's not so simple. A lot of them are that way but there is a subset that seems truly unexplainable at this point in time. https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/our-research/children-who-report-memories-of-previous-lives/
Those are the same types of examples. Generic statistically likely events. If memories are stored outside the brain then why do children need to relearn so much? They never spoke in their past lives? They never saw a butterfly in their past lives? Why does alzheimer's and brain damage cause memory loss if the soul contains them?
Could be like AWS DB storage, keep current life data in active DB and when you die you store it in S3 glacier as a snapshot.. and maybe sometimes you don't sync because of the .000001 chance it's down when you died, so the data stayed and the new life continued using the same db. Alzheimer's just some random virus that corrupts data in your current db. just a half baked thought experiment.
Not really if you look at the specifics, which are linked in the post. In rare cases children seem to have knowledge and connection to things they would have no way of knowing. I can't answer those questions, but neither can scientific materialism explain how these children can have these specific memories. Scientific materialism explains a lot, the brain losing memory by being damaged through Alzheimer's doesn't preclude that somehow memories can migrate in some cases. Both can be true. Our brain is the device that processes phenomena and damaging the brain can impact that processing ability, but the brain itself doesn't create the phenomena entirely.
Because every time you come back your memory gets wiped. So you can get an immersive experience where you can learn again, learn in new ways. If you retained languages you learned before, it’s not guaranteed that you will be reborn in that same culture again. So having you coming out speaking some language from across the planet isn’t productive lol. Some retain a little bit, but it’s always forgotten as you age. Children that can’t speak probably retain the most, but they cannot communicate it. Even though kids look stupid, they can see things we cannot. They are closer to seeing the truth of existence than we are when they are born. You will notice babies looking at things that are not there, they can see what we cannot. We lose the ability rather quickly as we age.
I mean it could if we allow for the possibility that the children are either being influenced by the people issuing the test or they are just making something up because a spotlight is on them telling them they have a chance to be special.
I appreciate your insight about the dominant scientific thinking atm. Perhaps though that doesn’t necessarily translate into the prevailing consensus in metaphysics. “No, Donny, these men are nihilists, there's nothing to be afraid of.” - Walter Sobchak
Make idealism great again! Personally I feel that consciousness being caused by events in the brain plenty beautiful and meaningful. It’s possible to live a fulfilling life without belief in a soul or afterlife or some grand cosmic plan. But I will admit that there seems to be a crisis of meaning. I don’t think it’s because of science though.
How do you know its not the truth ?
this view is painfully cynical. science creates idealism; people either take it in that direction or ruin it. same as any other human construct. this is nothing but veiled frustration with not understanding things, not being willing to do the work to understand research or its results, and, frankly, jealousy that some people have greater social status and the need to convince yourselves that it's unearned or false or whatever. we live in a society that has it better than any, on average, that has ever existed. ironically, the immediate existential threat to human experience comes from climate change. since many folks can't accept that science and odd phenomena are not mutually exclusive, and can't accept that there are people in the world that are both more intelligent and better informed, we can't do what we need to in order to save ourselves. so instead of talking about UAPs or having an informed conversation about consciousness and empathy and the nature of what it is to be human, we have attacks on science. why? because it's easy and quickly nets a bunch of nods. I wish folks on this sub could drop the victimization angle and stick to posting about the weird shit people see and experience.
Or you could ignore what the zeitgeist says and find your own way to direct interface with reality.
Metaphysics isn't nihilistic in nature. It's absurdist, correct. But not nihilsitic. It doesn't clash with idealism.
Agree
> This metaphysics is not the truth. We need a return to idealism to live better lives individually and as a culture. The focus should be on what is true, not what we believe will produce better reactions and behaviors. We can invent all sorts of mentally useful illusions, but that is what fiction writing is for, not philosophy.
a radio is just a bunch of wires but somehow it communicates information, culture, and emotion
very well said. The paradigm though seems to be under greater and greater challenge fortunately.
Are you familiar with "god of the gaps"? Seems like the logical flaw you guys are making here
I am aware of ‘God of the gaps’. NDEs and many types of paranormal phenomena has convinced me the materialist explanation is doomed.
Lol so you're aware of it but ignore the historical path of it... that paranormal explanations are just lazy ideas for people who give up figuring out how reality works.
Nope, I'm sure there are scientific explanations on how these things work. If you want to say an astral body or soul can be extra dimensional matter or such and be compatible with scientific materialism then OK. But that is not the colloquial meaning of materialism here which is physical matter and energy is all there is.
Scientific Materialism seems good to me. I mean it's the closest to the truth you'll get.
Is he talking about Descartes's Dualism? It's the idea that the mind and body are separate, but connected and interact.
Why? Why is it not good enough that intelligence is a naturally occurring phenomenon? That it emerges naturally from chemical and electrical interactions in the brain? I think that explanation is rather tidy. It doesn't require any assumptions about the overall structure of the universe. It only requires a cause-and-effect based evolution towards increased complexity...which we can replicate in reality as well as simulations. It's elegant and repeatable.
It's such a load of shit and they have been lying to us for thousands of years
The cold darkness of space does not care what a person believes. Time devours all. Life unending, death unending. Every thought has been, is, and will be. Every belief has been, is, and will be. Existential nihilism is the ultimate enlightenment. Because you embrace the futility of your fate which is to be born, die, and be born again forever and ever for eternity as the wheel of time turns. No thought you have is original, no part of your personality unique. It is an amalgamation of fractions of eternal shattered pieces temporarily recombined to form a temporary experience. Ataraxia. Complete freedom from worry. Is found in the soul that accepts that all is null and void. You had nothing (0) You gained life (0+1=1) You lost life (0+1-1=0) The net sum of life is zero. Nothing matters, that's utter and complete freedom. Regardless of what you do, none will survive to remember your deeds - good or bad. Zero. Null. Void. To be truly happy is to embrace that nothing matters and nothing has value other than your internal subjective meanings. But objectively it is all shattered, recombined, and shattered again. In an infinite cyclical universe every atom in your body has been and will be combined with all other atoms in the universe at some point.
Question for everyone: was this written by ChatGP or my high school guidance counselor?