Curious George
Veteran Member
Though it is fried bread it is called frybread.
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Atheism people Argument, "I don't believe in Bigfoot." 2
- Thread starter paarsurrey
- Start date
When I say I have no belief about God, I mean I have no concepts about God any God that I have faith in. I have no faith in any concepts about bigfoot either.
So I know about many different concepts of God but I place no faith in any of them.
Yerda
Veteran Member
Any god in particular?I agree.
I still believe - despite the many frustrated comments I have received due to it- that everyone believes in god.
And that remains the heart of the difference between our views. Reality is the same thing as the realm of the physical sciences. 'Non-physical' in that context can only mean 'not real', 'lacking objective existence', 'imaginary'. There is, as far as I can see, no way of distinguishing the 'spiritual' from the imaginary; and that's because the first is a subset of the second. Thought is physical; no brain, no thought ─ damaged brain, damaged thought ─ impaired brain, impaired thought. Plus, with modern tools you can watch a brain at work in real time: totally astonishing, but wholly physical.
With my monist hat on, I think of mass-energy as the pure content of the Big Bang at Time Zero. Thus I hypothesize that the entire universe including the elements, the particles, the forces and the dimensions, are all qualities of energy. I can't demonstrate that this is correct, but I know of no demonstration that it's wrong, and such simplicity is enticing.
Taking off my monist hat and letting the Big Bang at Time Zero contain a salad, I'd argue that it's still very convincingly the case that the universe is entirely physical, and that the entirety of human mentation, including anything we might like to call 'spiritual', is in fact a biochemical / bioelectrical product (perhaps touched here and there with QM, though I'm not aware of any established examples).
You will differ, I will say Show me, you will reply, Shut your eyes and look inwards, and I will reply ...
My best regards, nonetheless.
This is of course a statement of the imagination, equally as much as saying reality is greater than that is. These are both ideas which have a substance and reality in the minds that hold them. The reality of it to you is held in the mind, thus giving it its objective reality to you.
Of course the thought is real, because you are thinking it and can look at the content of the thought, even though the content of the thought itself is not actually physical. An image of a bunny rabbit in the mind is not an actual bunny rabbit. It is equally as real as a pink unicorn is in the mind. Both have equal amounts of substance in the mind, regardless if they have some physical correlate in the material world. In the mind, they both have the same substantive existence. The mind sees both as objects, and neither exists outside the mind. What the mind sees as the bunny rabbit, is not an actual bunny. It is a mental image.
In the same way an observation of the eyes of a bunny rabbit in your yard chewing on some grass creates a mental image for you, the experience of reality for many can be such that it creates other mental images as correlates to experience, such as comprise the vocabulary of spiritual realities. It’s no different than emotional experiences have a vocabulary and different mental images.
We live inside a symbolic reality in our heads, whether these symbols have physical correlates, or emotional correlates, or spiritual correlates. All of them are mental images, and all have actual, tangible, real substance, such that entire systems of thought engage with these images, or “imaginations”.
In reality, the imagination is actually more real to the mind, than the actual reality they appear to represent. Whether it’s physical, emotional, or spiritual, 99+% of the time we live inside our imaginations about the word outside of them. The only times we are not, is when were are either in deep dreamless sleep, or fully present in the moment without thoughts in our waking conscious minds, or our subconscious which registers everything we experience prior to thoughts forming around them and changing the nature of their reality to us.
I’m holding an image of a leprechaun in my mind right now. Does that image in my mind not exist? Then what is that image I am seeing? Thought has a physical component to it, of course. But the content of it, is non-physical. Even if you want to say the electrical impulse makes it physical, then you have to say that the leprechaun is reality. It has an actual physical substance to it that could ostensibly be measured in my brain.
Do you accept that as true? If you do, then it is in fact safe to say that the entire library of your thoughts about reality is wholly physical. Your idea that anything that is not physical is not real, would of necessity accept unicorns and leprechauns and banshees into the domain of the material world, since there is a physical correlate to the thoughts about them.
I have no problem accepting the validity of imagining this.
Experience is experience. That our minds form a mentation around that experience would seem to indicate there is a reality that the mental images are pointing to. Our minds imagine reality, with a correlation of some experience which comes in many forms, simple observation being but one of those. None of those mental images are facts. All of them are imaginary, including God, including the bunny rabbit, including ourselves. Who or what we think we are is imaginary. What we are is simply experienced, and all the rest is mentation.
Reality is imaginary, to the mind. But is the mind the only way we know reality?
That’s not what I’m saying here. I’m saying open your eyes and see the mind for what it is, and quit placing so much faith in the imagination. Start seeing the eyes that do the looking, when evaluating what is actual reality. In fact, no idea at all is the best place to begin. Don't look anywhere at all. Just simply be. At that point, it becomes apparent that any idea at all is an imaginary reality. The illusion of the mind is when we do not see that what we think about reality is itself not itself an imagination of our minds, but actual reality.
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Not really. It follows directly from my three assumptions: that a world exists external to the self, that our senses are capable of informing us about that world, and that reason is a valid tool. By posting here you indicate agreement with 1 and 2, and I trust you agree with 3. If so, on what basis would you say there was more to (external) reality than our senses (aided by instruments where required) can tell us?
The concept of a rabbit can be roughly likened to the drawing of a rabbit on a sheet of paper. No real rabbit, but the representation of one, based on language and denotation, different kinds of memory including connotation, and the things one associated with rabbit and rabbitness. And all of these things are the result of the states, biochemicals and functions of the wholly physical brain.
If a concept has a counterpart out there in reality, a counterpart with objective existence, then it's the concept of something real. Otherwise it's not the concept of something real. And if it's not real then it exists only in mentation ─ is imaginary, as I usually say. But it exists in physical form, which is why brain damage can be so devastating.
Yes, as a concept, a physical brain state.
What else could it be and still have objective existence? Magic?
The brain state is physical, like the sheet of paper. The concept in the brain, like the drawing on the paper, can be of just about anything ─ Donald Trump or Mickey Mouse.
Things aren't real for the sole reason that we can imagine them. Things are real because they have objective existence ─ they exist independently of the concept of them in any brain.
But assumptions of any sort are a product of the imagination. Any model of reality we create, originates in our imaginations. We create a picture in our minds of reality. That is a function of the imagination. How practical and useful that may be or not, how valid they are are or not, is irrelevant to that fact.
I believe we create an image of reality that we use our minds to interface with with varying degrees of effectiveness within a given context. When I say there is more than just these, I am saying that using the mind's model-making imagination can transcend just mere scientific understandings of nature, the "external" map of reality that the mind imagines is the true nature of existence. By including the subjective, you have now transcended the context of imagining only the external as reality. The context of reality now includes the subjective set of eyes seeing, and its use of the imagination, in how it sees and holds truth to exist.
I was agreeing with you up until that last sentence where you try to reduce everything to chemicals and whatnot. Why can't you instead say that the chemical states of the physical brain instead are responses to the thought, that they are the physiological correlate? In fact, there is pretty clear evidences that by simply choosing our thoughts, we change the chemicals and physical responses.
I'm sure you've heard of the placebo effect? You are familiar with Cognitive Behavioral Sciences, as well as one other example? Will you try to say that the choice to change one's perception of truth is simply generated by the chemicals, and it is an illusion of choice? Then explain how the chemical chose to change its chemical in order to make a mental choice to change itself? The chemical must have had some degree of indepence from itself, right? If not, then explain where they choice of how to think and what the responses that follow that change originate from, if you are intent on a reductionist view of casualties?
While I agree there are certainly physiological components supporting the thoughts, and why shouldn't there be, the actual image of the bunny rabbit itself is not given shape by the chemicals themselves. The brain supports thoughts existing and forming, but does not prescribe their actual content. The content itself, is non-physical. It's mental. It's imagery and meaning and value, and all of these other things which exist, but do not have physical forms.
The concept of God or angels, or demons, or spirits, etc, also have counterparts in reality with an objective existence. What we call it is just what we call it, whether we call it an evil spirit or a germ. You see it as a germ, they saw it as a spirit. Functionally, they hold the same position in our imagination of reality.
They assumed what they called something about reality was real. You assume so too. Their minds, and your mind, were doing the exact same thing, only with different concepts, different models, different vocabularies. They weren't just laying around on a couch tripping out in some opium den of life. They were functioning in the real world, with their imaginary realities they called it, just the same as you today are. These were functional systems of thoughts about the real world, even if they imagined it was gods instead of electromagnetism.
Not everything has physical form. For instance, "truth". What physical form can you produce for me that I can put on the shelf alongside a glass bottle? What is a "truth" in the physical world? Yet, to us, "truth" exists.
I can see a leprechaun in my mind. Can you see it looking at the brain? No? You can call it a state (which it's technically not), but even so, a state of mind does not produce the image itself. There is no such things as a leprechaun state, or a unicorn state of the brain that you can look at and say "there it is! You can see the shape of that little green fellow right there on the EEG."
As an interesting experiment, I'll bet you if you were measuring the activities of the brain where someone is imagining everything they can about leprechauns and unicorns, the same areas will be lighting up the same as when someone is imagining a multiverse, or the Big Bang, or dark matter, or quantum mechanics, etc. I may be wrong, but I'll bet you'd see both as functions of the brain, or brain states, whether the content is mythological or scientific. You'd see the same states, with only the content and the sense of what is "real" depending on the person studied. Not sure if such a study exists, but I'd be darned curious to see!
To someone thinking in magical frameworks as reality, they would have objective existence. They would be absolutely real to them. This is the same thing for those who think of things like "atoms" in a scientific frameworks. An atom is a mental object, pointing to "something" in reality, just like the leprechaun does for those living in a mythic or magical framework. These things have function, they aren't just pure nonsense for those who make use of these.
Actually I don't like the sheet of paper analogy. The brain state is more like the graphite of the pencil drawing on the sheet of paper of consciousness itself. The imagination, is what moves the pencil to form a certain image that mind can then process and fit into its systems of thoughts, be that a magic system of though, a mythic system of thought, a scientific system of thought, etc. The brain has a function, but it's not the source. It's a machine that supports these processes, not its creator.
But if you are thinking it, it now has an objective existence. If you hold an image of a leprechaun in your mind, and you look at it there, you are seeing something that has existence. It exists inside your mind. It is an object of the mind, therefore it is "objective", it exists as an object of your observation and perception. And this is how we see reality, inside our minds, even if those objects its sees are scientific instead of mythic.
As the saying goes, we don't see the eyes we're looking out through. If anyone is interested in objective reality here, it's found in what I'm objectively stating about what we see as objective reality. We see objects in our minds as reflective of external reality. Our imaginations, constitutes what has objective reality to us.
These aren't ordinary or arbitrary assumptions. They have to be assumed because none of them can be demonstrated as correct without first assuming it's true. Moreover, as I pointed out, anyone who posts on RF shares the first two, that a world exists external to the self, and that the senses are capable of informing us of that world, and I trust the third, that reason is a valid tool.
Which of the three assumptions do you dispute? Do you say no world exists external to the self, making you a solipsist? Do you say we're blind to that world, that our senses deceive us in fundamental ways? Do you say reason can't be used for the things we use it for? What, exactly?
No, it begins in our genes, which is how come we have sense organs at all, and are born with a full kit of instincts for employing them in a manner useful to survival (and, later, breeding). That includes moving head, body and limbs from the start (as had been happening in utero), making sounds, opening eyes and looking about, especially at faces, understanding the breast and its purpose, and so on and so on.
Infants instinctively develop concepts, just as carers instinctively talk to babies in motherese, point to things and name them, and lead the baby's attention in particular directions. The baby for its part instinctively knows it's in a relationship with the carer, and very soon turns to look where the carer is looking, or is pointing, repeats related sounds, imitates gestures and expressions, and so on. That's all hard-wired. The imagining comes later.
As, in effect, I just said, I strongly disagree.
I on the other hand think we are born with, and also develop, a wide range of responses to sensory cues and that we most routinely relate to reality by responding to those cues rather than relying on any map of reality in our head ─ not that we don't have various maps, senses of external structures and social arrangements, in our heads, but that we live in and respond to reality far more directly.
What then is a thought? How does it exist? If it doesn't have physical existence, how can the brain respond to it? And if the brain responds to it, why can't we see such interactions in the lab, since exactly such phenomena must exist constantly and in enormous quantities in the brain?
And why is it the case, no brain, no thought, and damaged or impaired brain, damaged or impaired thought?
And how does an immaterial 'thought' get information about reality?
And why does an immaterial thought need or want a brain at all?
I don't know what experiment you're referring to, but we can get computers to be self-reprogramming, so it'd be no great wonder that complex biochemistry could do the same, no?
Oh, and how do we 'choose our thoughts'? Please talk me through the process of choosing a thought.
I doubt people consistently have such a specific god-conception for their personal use. Even if they do, that only highlights how varied those conceptions are when they exist.
But what you seem to be neglecting is that God is an entirely optional concept. Very few people actually need or even benefit from it.
I agree.
I still believe - despite the many frustrated comments I have received due to it
Really? I must have missed those threads.
Nope. It is a statement of stance towards a vague, purposefully ill-defined belief.
paarsurrey
Veteran Member
"Very few people actually need or even benefit from it."
I understand that believers have always been in majority both in numbers and also in benefiting from it more than the non-believers have in numbers as well as benefiting from the no-religions. Right, please?
Regards
I very much doubt it, at various levels even.
First of all, I strongly suspect that actual belief in the literal existence of a God has always been fairly rare. My personal experience from inside a largely Christian (mostly Catholic with a strong component of various Protestant movements) culture shows true Theism to be remarkable because it is so odd. Most people who adhere to Catholicism or even Protestantism and Spiritism seem to do so in order to appease the family at first, and to keep a common vocabulary and set of references after that. It is taboo to speak of disbelief openly, but even the discourse itself shows disbelief to be quite natural and expected.
As for theistic belief being a benefit, that is probably true for a small percentage of people. It plainly isn't for most people, even when the belief itself is genuine and spontaneous.
And that is without touching the matter of how one should deal with the wide variation of deity-beliefs.
Theism is legitimate and can be constructive. But not when treated as a given, as something to be expected from other people.
It doesn't matter what type of assumptions they are, good or bad, they are still something created by the imagination. Claiming that they aren't ordinary or arbitrary, doesn't change that fact. The mind envisions what is reality. That's a function of imagination. Envisioning is imagining.
It's a simple thing actually. A model of reality is a mental image. A mental image is a product of the imagination. It imagines a structure that to it represents reality. It then overlays this upon reality itself. The mind then sees the model as the reality of the thing it sees. The mind experiences reality through it's imagination about reality. The imagined world becomes the real world to the mind. The mind in actually is seeing its own imagination reflecting back at itself as the world. We live in an imaginary reality, regardless of the nature of what is imagined. Whether it's magic or science, it's still the same thing at its core.
There is a real material world that actually exists. I'm not a solipsist.
Are we blind to that world? We are sighted, but blind at the same time. We see, but do not see. What we see very much reflects our imaginations of what is real, to the point it all becomes a projection of our minds on the screen of reality. The meanings of the story can be made to conform itself to the sceneries, but other stories can also be written and experienced against the same sceneries. It doesn't matter how simplistic or sophisticated the story is that the writers created. It's still a created reality reflecting the minds and imaginations of the writers. It's the human version of reality, regardless if it's written as a fantasy or a documentary in style.
Can reason be used for the things we use it? Certainly, of course! It's a useful tool. I'm using it here in explaining what we know about the mind and how we create reality for ourselves with it.
You believe the specific models of reality we come up with originate in our genes? Do you have any supporting evidence for this? I said all models of reality are products of our minds imagining a "what if" projection upon the world, to which you responded with this. All models of reality are products of the mind, not inherited through our DNA. I'm honestly very confused how you think it could be? Is there a "creationist gene"?
Yes, all human minds develop in certain patterns, and conceptualizations are part of that development. The actual content of what gets added is in fact not genetic, but cultural. A young child does not genetically start naming objects with the same names others in its family does, "miraculously" naming a swing a "swing".
My point is, the we all have imagination that are part of nature, and not culture. What we call something, what model we impose upon reality, is a product of that inherent imagination. The context of the imagination itself is the same, the content of the imagination is a product of itself.
You are referring to something that is not yet present in infants at birth, but an early stage development at around 6 months or something. In infancy, there is no "other" to the child. The mother is seen as an extension of itself. The world is undifferentiated from the self. It is only later through the process of discovery, that conceptions of "this is not that" begins to appear.
A young child bites his hand and then bites his blanket. At first it doesn't understand this differentiation, but then later as the brain develops, it begins to see it differently. Now it becomes "Me" and "Not me" as a concept. The content of that concept, is itself a mental image. "Me and Not-Me" are products of the imagination. Conceptualizing itself, is the act of image creation, or "imagination".
But those responses are based upon our sense of what those are in our head. And what those are in our heads, are not inherent to nature itself. They are learned. They are taught.
A child has to be told, one way or another, not to place its hand into open flame. It does not know this instinctively. What do you imagine all these "No!" words from parents are all about when their child is learning about reality? They are teaching their minds to hold mental concepts about reality.
We learn to fear things. And when we see them as a thing to be feared, that is a product of the imagination. It creates a mental image of something and attaches meaning to it. That meaning is not inherent in nature.
Bottom line, no infant inherently, left on its own, will end up seeing the world as others do. But when conditioned, when the imagination is shaped and influenced by others, then "reality" becomes created for them, and they spend their lives unaware of reality beyond their imaginations of it. Call it a mass hallucination, if you will.
How? Explain how reality is not a meditated reality for us? Can you support this, outside the analogy of an infant somehow being born with this knowledge of the world? I've explained how that is not the case, but rather the infant does not yet make any differentiation between itself and the world. They are fused in the infant's reality, and only later the process of differentiation begins to occurs through various stages where it starts to imagine things as the things we name them.
How other than this, do you see we interface directly? The only way I know of is mystical experience, where you move past conceptualizing and naming objects as things. Are you championing that? Are you saying practice meditation in order to see beyond the illusory reality created by the mind's imagination? If so, then why are we debating? Our conversation will take a radical shift in direction here.
If I motion my hand in a circle, is the circle nothing other than my muscles? Do we talk about the circle, by talking about my biceps? You can't see a rabbit when you look at my brain. It doesn't matter if the thought arises out of the brain itself. You don't look at the brain. You don't talk about the brain, when you talk about the content of the thought. The content of thought, is nonphysical. The act of thinking, which is physical, is not the same thing as the thought itself.
We do see this. What do you mean? If they tell a subject to think of some event in their life, or imagine something, they see it light up certain parts of the brain. There's the interaction right there.
Deep dreamless sleep occurs every night. Our brains are neither damaged nor impaired. These are states of the mind. If we have no thoughts, do we have no brain? To me, this alone itself should clue us in that our conceptual realities don't create true picture of reality.
Through the imagination. I'm not saying that thoughts are disconnected from the brain. Just as the circle drawn by the hand does not draw itself without the arm. But the circle is not the arm. You say the thought is the brain, which is the same thing as saying the circle is the arm.
You're imagining these things as supernatural things, like ghosts. I'm not thinking on that level.
You're kidding? Here's a simple experiment. Close your eyes and imagine your loved one being stuck by a car while they are out walking and are killed. Do you feel tightness in various places of your body? Do you feel emotions responding? Look at where those are occurring, look at the sensations themselves. Feel them, experience them.
Now, what just happened? You chose a thought without any actual event in reality happening. You used your imagination, and the psychical body responded to it. Your thought created a chemical response to itself. The body did not "create the thought" as part of some autonomic system. You chose to think from "somewhere", and the body responded.
Ah, but the self-programming is all about the software, not the hardware! Welcome to my world of understanding.
The software needs the hardware in order to run, but the software is not the hardware itself.Well, isn't that one of the "Big Questions" of philosophy and spirituality? Do you have an answer for this that others don't?
My two cents on this, I believe, conditionally, there is a "will" that can be seen as "outside" the thought itself. If it's lazy, or just no being engaged, it just goes along for the ride of whatever thoughts are automatically flowing by out of habit. They say we basically run the same six story lines all day in our heads, constantly cycling through one iteration or another of the same things. But one can choose to not engage in those, to not go along for the ride in that river of thought.
Now, suddenly you can see the thoughts. So, who, or more accurately what is that which sees thought and is not thought? What do you call that?
Thermos aquaticus
Well-Known Member
"Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time."--Bertrand Russell
The burden of proof lies with theists, not atheists.
The burden of proof lies with theists, not atheists.
paarsurrey
Veteran Member
What is one's assertion and the evidence here, please?
Regards
Thermos aquaticus
Well-Known Member
The assertion is that God exists. The lack of evidence is what justifies the dismissal of that assertion on the part of atheists.
Again, the burden of proof lies with the person who claims that something exists, not with the person who is skeptical of the claim.
paarsurrey
Veteran Member
Is it your assertion that "God exists", please?
If yes, thanks.
If not, please provide it.
Regards
Thermos aquaticus
Well-Known Member
I am an atheist, so no. I do not assert that God does or does not exist. It is theists who make the assertion that a deity exists.
paarsurrey
Veteran Member
Thermos aquaticus
Well-Known Member
Do you understand that the burden of proof lies with the person who claims that something exists?