I would say consciousness not being just an emergent property of the physical brain would be 'supernatural' under my definition.
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Natural vs. Supernatural: Real Distinction or Made-Up Crap?
- Thread starter Jared Jammer
- Start date
Twilight Hue
Twilight, not bright nor dark, good nor bad.
By manipulation you can easily affect consciousness and mind.
Kuzcotopia
If you can read this, you are as lucky as I am.
We can confirm the cranial nerves, and labelling the parts of the brain based on their respective functions and evolution.
But I struggle accepting that we share framing devices, or the collective unconscious. Those are culturally mediated. and not universal, IMO.
Thanks for your reponse.
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Unification
Well-Known Member
Would you consider everything objective that we have in common as a collective conscious? Ie: mathematics, laws of nature, birth/death, science, truth, fact, that which is, same planet, same universe, same necessities of life, etc.?
Unification
Well-Known Member
Mankind/mindkind's definitions of consciousness or mind are kind of vague, and limited, and theoretical, but some parts of the brain can definitely be altered.. Most likely portions but not all of the brain and/or mind via chemical reaction or some kind of stimulation. With alteration, one would still be living or existent. Unless the alteration resulted to physical death, brain and heart function ceasing which we could never individually be conscious of being physically dead.
Kuzcotopia
If you can read this, you are as lucky as I am.
As long as we have a common language thst allows us to share the same definitions of those things, that sounds okay.
Mathematics, for example, is logically the same regardless so it won't matter how we define it.
But the word Truth is trickier. You can't assume that we all share the same
Truth as part of a collective conscious, because that has a cultural context.
So we'd have to define what it is and agree on it. There are interpretive elements, making that a challenge for us.
As another example from your earlier post was using contextual symbols to describe portions of the brain as Adam, Eve, and Serpent. I find this challenging for many reasons, but I'll give you one:
Is it the man or the woman who gets to be the neocortex? The research behind the neocortex is one thing, but ascribing a gender, and it's associated cultural contexts, says more about you and the mythology of traditional theism (from which you are borrowing) than it does about the brain and it's functions. Not judging, but it's not something I am keen on doing.
This may be the core difference between naturalism and spiritualism, IMO. Naturalists are trying to understand the world independently of those contexts because we see them as relative.
I could take any three concepts to describe the mind:
If I was a Viking: metal (hindbrain), warhammer (limbic), rune (neocortex)
If I was a tailor: sheep (hindbrain), needle (limbic), dress (neocortex)
If I was a politician: voters (hindbrain), truth (limbic), lies (neocortex)
Sure they don't make perfect sense now, but I'd need to develop the right language to express each concept in relation to each other, and how it represents either a truth, or a series if progressive steps to truth, or both, or neither.
Enjoying the civil conversation. Hope to continue.
Affect it is undeniable..........the disputed point is its source.
Jared Jammer
Member
Is the multiverse natural or supernatural? How does it differ from God?
It seems these oft-made criticisms against God apply equally well against the multiverse. It also seems, given the definition of supernatural used by many in here, that the multiverse would qualify as such.
- Beyond Our Universe
- Beyond Observation
- Untestable
- Unfalsifiable
It seems these oft-made criticisms against God apply equally well against the multiverse. It also seems, given the definition of supernatural used by many in here, that the multiverse would qualify as such.
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Unification
Well-Known Member
I'll approach with the most objective and subjective definition of truth: that in accord with reality, that which is.
One objective truth and one subjective truth.
Objective as in mathematics, and everything that we have in common collectively, a brain, a heart, blood, skin, bones, conscious, eyes, ears, nose, twelve cranial nerves, glands, water, every other component of brain and body, same universe, same earth, we can't create something from nothing, etc.
Subjective as in anything that we individually perceive as truth in our created reality.
Just as fire and water and air and other things have metaphorical meanings, so would the sun and the moon, husband and wife, child, man and woman, etc.
That's the difference with spiritual texts: they are mythical and allegorical in a literal, historical, or physical sense...when it's the message and meaning behind the objects, people, and places. The physical and natural see everything outward, as in literal husband and wife, literal children, literal places, literal buildings, literal man and woman, literal everything and that's where divide and believing in lies and myths and crazy things occur in the hundreds of thousands of religions. Behind the texts there is deep hidden spiritual objective truth.
The masculine and feminine aspects of the texts are opposites just as the universe works. I suppose one would have to divulge in much of the texts to see why the Adam and the Eve would represent conscious and subconscious. The conscious (objective mind) can't be deceived but the subconscious(subjective mind can by the illusion and imagination and emotion one births in their own unique individual experience of reality) Eve: mother of all living. Wives subjecting/submitting to their husbands would be ones subjective mind submitting to their objective mind. Lower mind submitting to higher mind. Subconscious submitting to conscious and so on. The Reptillian brain and Limbic systems are in the same region of the brain (texts depict enmity between Eve's seed and the serpents seed) the reptillian brain also scientifically being the oldest and most ancient part of our brain via evolved. (Animalistic instinct of survival, greed, lust, sexual impulses, where much deception would derive from, etc.) texts also depicting this ancient serpent animal mind that needs defeated, etc.
Most of the texts have an objective deeper meaning for what occurs in the brain/mind and the twelve cranial nerves, cerebellum, cerebrum, brain stem, east and west hemispheres of brain, and how they regulate our 5 senses, our perception, our everything. Tree of "knowledge" of good and evil is in the brain where "knowledge" is stored. Adam "knowing" his wife is metaphorical for the conscious impregnating the subconscious with a seed of knowledge (child).
The tabernacle(temple) of God would be the brain with the 12 tribes of Israel camped around it. (12 cranial nerves)
The 2 cheribum as the east and west hemispheres of brain, and the rest of the tabernacle(brain) has many metaphorical meanings.
All the murder and destruction of children are not literal children but the defeat of evil knowledge, emotion, desires, etc within ones brain that have raped and have had hold on ones mind leaving them in a conscious state of hell. A cleansing and renewing of the mind from the cosmic energy (flood coming to destroy ones created world)
A thorough study of the brain can see much of what each component does, scientifically. The things we cannot see or determine of the brain, the texts depict as God or consciousness. How the east hemisphere is where the light comes from. From the east hemisphere is where our spiritual, intuitive aspects derive from. West hemisphere where our more rational and objective aspects derive from. Marriage in the texts are when these two become one. Kind of sounds like science and God becoming one. Makes rational sense. Science is trying to explain things apart from consciousness and will always fail. biased approaches for one will never work. Just as the theist would need to be rational and objective and open minded to science, the atheist would also have to be spiritually rational and objective and open minded. It's truth and abundant life within that sets one free. A theory of everything is always pursued but not the theory of God because it can't be tangibly seen or physically tested by visible eye, only experienced within ones brain and body. It can be tested within oneself, just have to surrender to it and know oneself. We are God's carrying out creation.
A theory of God can never be found looking out there or externally, a theory of God can only be found and experienced internally. Our divine nature discovered within by the coming of cosmic energy from the cosmos within our brains and bodies. Ie: kundalini/Holy Spirit.
I believe that with all of the definitions, images of God and all of the different dieties that mindkind has perceived and made up literally and outwardly through imaginations, illusions, and emotions.... and in vain and lies from the hundreds of thousands of different religions and vain buildings, it leaves one beyond irrational and deceived.
The opposite is more true, the atheist would be closer to finding/knowing/experiencing divinity than most theists because they already have the rational and objective and oneness part down. Just have to open the gates to the eastern side of the brain.
Ouroboros
Coincidentia oppositorum
If God isn't natural, then is God unnatural?
God is natural and supernatural, like part of nature and beyond nature. God is not just one side of a coin, but God is the coin.
To define God as-is this or that is to make God less than what God is. Definitions make God finite.
Questions like these are like asking how many peanuts can you eat in the color green? Or what's the sound of five?
God is the description and definition, not the thing we describe or define.
Kuzcotopia
If you can read this, you are as lucky as I am.
First, thank you for taking the time to share all of these ideas. I'm going to break up your post so I can discuss it in a couple of sections. Thanks!
I think we can agree here. I am not an expert in cognitive psychology by any means, but I do understand that perception of reality is interpretive, suggesting a subjective reality separate from an objective reality. I would only add that the objectively reality is independent of me, and the subjective reality is only me see the objective reality.
This is where you lose me, for several reasons:
1. The symbolic language you are using is not culturally universal. You use a set of concepts from a specific theist creation myth to build your entire subjective reality. The Iroquios, a nation of Native Americans, had a myth surrounding a series of angelic sky people. One of the women became pregnant, and the pushed her out, where she landed on a turtle in a world of water. The sea creatures kept adding mud to the turtle until if formed all of north america. In this myth, you may interpret the reptile as the saviour instead of an enemy to defeat. Motherhood protection suggests a harmony with all creatures and nature, and proper subjective experience embrace the whole brain as a single foundation. In other words, you can use any creation myth to produce any subjective meaning you desire.
2. The symbolic language you are using is not narratively universal. You use a specific myth that is not universal . You could substitute Greek gods for all of this, perhaps Apollo and Artemis, depicting sun and moon. Only instead of feminine submission, the female Aremis is a hunter, born of the wild. She is the strong one, untamed and running with the wolves. Apollo is the sun, but he's more of a metrosexual pretty boy from the city, skilled in poetry and the arts. Instead of a single snake representing the primordial mind, maybe you have a series of mythological beasts representing a series of base desires: The Minotaur refers to our lustful natures to be lost in mazes of our subconscious, the fire-belching chimera, which represents our multi-headed rage that takes on many forms of the stubborn goat, the boastful lion, and on and on. Point here is, the narrative texts you choose to pull your symbolism might as well be random, and that randomness changes the derived meaning.
3. The symbolic language you are using is not logically valid. Your subjective reality relies on opposites that are not so. A true opposite might include statements such as the opposite of on is off, the opposite of up is down, and the opposite of a proton is an electron, the opposite of white is black. However, there are other opposites that are not accurate by definition, but ones we accept culturally. The opposite of ketchup is mustard, the opposite of the east is the west, and the opposite of male is female. Remember, male and female humans are separate by a single chromosome, and you've chosen to produce this massive mythological construct based on the logical fallacy of not only their opposites, but a suggestion of superiority and subjugation. I understand why though. . . it's not like you're the first one to do this!
You suggest that there is a supernatural reality because you recognize truths based on your subjective reality, so do you have a billion others as yourself that you can communicate with regarding your subjective reality and have them understand it? Or are you alone. . . . lost in a billion other subjective realities, each making their own meaning regarding the same texts, using metaphors that only they can truly interpret for themselves?
I would suggest that you are a faith of a single person, cut off and alone because of your subjective perspective. You have your subjective interpretation, and a collected set of symbolic meanings that you've constructed. But ultimately, you and any other person in the universe will be speaking, metaphorically. . . a different language. You can try to explain it, but unless their cultural context and grasp of the symbols and their meanings are precisely identical to yours, you will not be able to truly communicate your insights. If your reality is personally, subjectively constructed. . . then so is everyone else's.
I hold a naturalist view, and I am able to share a common language with anyone who shares that view, without the incapacities of separate semiotic interpretive systems who do not share metaphorical meanings. I am happy with that. It is very comforting.
I consider myself to be intelligent, open-minded, and creative. I consider you to be so as well. I can tell that you have seriously thought through your belief system, and you aren't just swallowing something that someone else has fed you. I appreciate that! I have spent years attempting to find god, and I've flirted with various metaphors and interpretive systems before realizing that I have been an Atheist the whole time. . . just a very creative atheist with a pretty good imagination who can find reasons to believe just about anything because I wanted to and it felt good, not because it was there.
If you are smart enough to know the difference between subjective and objective reality, than so am I. I have considered it seriously, and while I have a subjective reality like everyone else, I choose to use language to build bridges between myself and others through the observations that we can share, as opposed to speaking only about the ones that I can only experience personally.
Thanks again for taking the time to talk with me. Look forward to your response.
I think we can agree here. I am not an expert in cognitive psychology by any means, but I do understand that perception of reality is interpretive, suggesting a subjective reality separate from an objective reality. I would only add that the objectively reality is independent of me, and the subjective reality is only me see the objective reality.
This is where you lose me, for several reasons:
1. The symbolic language you are using is not culturally universal. You use a set of concepts from a specific theist creation myth to build your entire subjective reality. The Iroquios, a nation of Native Americans, had a myth surrounding a series of angelic sky people. One of the women became pregnant, and the pushed her out, where she landed on a turtle in a world of water. The sea creatures kept adding mud to the turtle until if formed all of north america. In this myth, you may interpret the reptile as the saviour instead of an enemy to defeat. Motherhood protection suggests a harmony with all creatures and nature, and proper subjective experience embrace the whole brain as a single foundation. In other words, you can use any creation myth to produce any subjective meaning you desire.
2. The symbolic language you are using is not narratively universal. You use a specific myth that is not universal . You could substitute Greek gods for all of this, perhaps Apollo and Artemis, depicting sun and moon. Only instead of feminine submission, the female Aremis is a hunter, born of the wild. She is the strong one, untamed and running with the wolves. Apollo is the sun, but he's more of a metrosexual pretty boy from the city, skilled in poetry and the arts. Instead of a single snake representing the primordial mind, maybe you have a series of mythological beasts representing a series of base desires: The Minotaur refers to our lustful natures to be lost in mazes of our subconscious, the fire-belching chimera, which represents our multi-headed rage that takes on many forms of the stubborn goat, the boastful lion, and on and on. Point here is, the narrative texts you choose to pull your symbolism might as well be random, and that randomness changes the derived meaning.
3. The symbolic language you are using is not logically valid. Your subjective reality relies on opposites that are not so. A true opposite might include statements such as the opposite of on is off, the opposite of up is down, and the opposite of a proton is an electron, the opposite of white is black. However, there are other opposites that are not accurate by definition, but ones we accept culturally. The opposite of ketchup is mustard, the opposite of the east is the west, and the opposite of male is female. Remember, male and female humans are separate by a single chromosome, and you've chosen to produce this massive mythological construct based on the logical fallacy of not only their opposites, but a suggestion of superiority and subjugation. I understand why though. . . it's not like you're the first one to do this!
You suggest that there is a supernatural reality because you recognize truths based on your subjective reality, so do you have a billion others as yourself that you can communicate with regarding your subjective reality and have them understand it? Or are you alone. . . . lost in a billion other subjective realities, each making their own meaning regarding the same texts, using metaphors that only they can truly interpret for themselves?
I would suggest that you are a faith of a single person, cut off and alone because of your subjective perspective. You have your subjective interpretation, and a collected set of symbolic meanings that you've constructed. But ultimately, you and any other person in the universe will be speaking, metaphorically. . . a different language. You can try to explain it, but unless their cultural context and grasp of the symbols and their meanings are precisely identical to yours, you will not be able to truly communicate your insights. If your reality is personally, subjectively constructed. . . then so is everyone else's.
I hold a naturalist view, and I am able to share a common language with anyone who shares that view, without the incapacities of separate semiotic interpretive systems who do not share metaphorical meanings. I am happy with that. It is very comforting.
I consider myself to be intelligent, open-minded, and creative. I consider you to be so as well. I can tell that you have seriously thought through your belief system, and you aren't just swallowing something that someone else has fed you. I appreciate that! I have spent years attempting to find god, and I've flirted with various metaphors and interpretive systems before realizing that I have been an Atheist the whole time. . . just a very creative atheist with a pretty good imagination who can find reasons to believe just about anything because I wanted to and it felt good, not because it was there.
If you are smart enough to know the difference between subjective and objective reality, than so am I. I have considered it seriously, and while I have a subjective reality like everyone else, I choose to use language to build bridges between myself and others through the observations that we can share, as opposed to speaking only about the ones that I can only experience personally.
Thanks again for taking the time to talk with me. Look forward to your response.
Kuzcotopia
If you can read this, you are as lucky as I am.
I believe in imaginary numbers. The square root of -1 is an imaginary, theoretical number. The math allows for this, and has a variety of real-world applications, such as electrical engineering (those pesky Sine and Cosine functions!).
I understand the elegance of mathematics, and how it can produce things like imaginary numbers that still work out in the real world. But of course, the imaginary numbers are not really imaginary.
So what does this have to do with your questions? I don't know. . . probably should have thought this one through. I guess I would say. . . I see how theoretical physics can produce these multiverses with some pretty elegant mathematics, and I'm sure that eventually there will be some technological applications that use such maths, and this tech will blow our minds.
But is there really multiverses, or is is just theoretical math like imaginary numbers? I would guess this Atheist would say that there are probably no actual multiverses.
Have fun with the rest of the Strawman. I did my part honestly for ya!
shawn001
Well-Known Member
There are hypothesis mathematically of mutilverses and there are not proven and they would be natural by definition. There might also be a way to test for them, they are working on it for one from the light left over from the Big Bang..
So it would be "Beyond Our Universe"
Not Beyond Observation
Not Untestable
Not Unfalsifiable.
Great scientists are wroking on those answers if its possible.
What God are we talking about here in the millions and millions of them on Earth. Describe a test using science for said entity?
shawn001
Well-Known Member
For the sake of argument if "God is light" does he have a speed limit due to the laws of nature? Its own laws?
Does God have mass, does a God need to "think" if it knows everything already. Why is God a "he." in almost all religions. How does God exist? What created God?
Pantheism believes the universe and Nature is God. So there you go if your a Pantheist.
I am not an atheist personally but,
Richard Carrier, in Sense and Goodness Without God, writes on page 255:
"But if the idea of a god is inherently illogical (if the very idea is self-contradictory or meaningless), or if it is contradicted by the evidence, then there are strong positive reasons to take a harder stance as an atheist – with respect to that particular god. For in this sense, even believers are strong atheists – they deny the existence of hundreds of gods. Atheists like me merely deny one more god than everyone else already does – in fact, I deny the existence of the same god already denied by believers in other gods, so I am not doing anything that billions of people don’t do already."
In other words, if you are a Christian, you probably don't believe in the existence of Allah, Vishnu or any of the myriad of other gods that people have followed throughout history. I don't believe in those gods either, so in this sense I'm not all that different to you. The only small difference is that I believe in one less God.
Rick O'Shez
Irishman bouncing off walls
Multiverse is a theory which is currently unproven, so in that respect it's similar to God. It seems likely that eventually we will work out a way to see beyond the observable universe and then be able to test the multiverse theory. I heard that one cosmologist has been looking for evidence of collisions, for example.
But will we ever be able to observe God, or test for God? Even assuming people could agree on what God actually is. God remains a possibility, the problem I see is people being emotionally attached to their belief in God and not keeping an open mind to other possibilities.
Sapiens
Polymathematician
Bunyip
pro scapegoat
I think that from a non-religious perspective there are two categories;
1. Things we understand.
2. Things we do not understand.
The ancients tended to look at things they didn't understand and attribute them to the gods - fertility, death, birth, thunder, wind and so on. So I see 'supernatural' as a made up notion - the imagining that somehow there still exists a space for what is not only unknown - but for some inexplicable reason is not knowable. I tend to think that is would be impossible to know that anything is not knowable - and yet the modern notion of the supernatural seems to rely on the assumption that there are unknowables, and hence somehow the divine.
If you look at how many believers approach apologetics - it is all about saying "oh well Mr atheist YOU explain how the universe began?" As if not knowing something somehow creates a gap into which the supernatural can be inserted.
1. Things we understand.
2. Things we do not understand.
The ancients tended to look at things they didn't understand and attribute them to the gods - fertility, death, birth, thunder, wind and so on. So I see 'supernatural' as a made up notion - the imagining that somehow there still exists a space for what is not only unknown - but for some inexplicable reason is not knowable. I tend to think that is would be impossible to know that anything is not knowable - and yet the modern notion of the supernatural seems to rely on the assumption that there are unknowables, and hence somehow the divine.
If you look at how many believers approach apologetics - it is all about saying "oh well Mr atheist YOU explain how the universe began?" As if not knowing something somehow creates a gap into which the supernatural can be inserted.
Monk Of Reason
༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ
In many ways yes the multiverse claim is in some ways like the god claim. However the multiverse hypothesis was formed out of the most advanced knowledge that we have obtained about the nature of our universe by the smartest people we have ever had. It is not my personal opinion that the formulators of many god claims have the same credentials or thought put into it. Both are baseless guesses that may fully be wrong but the multiverse hypothesis is an educated guess while god would be a shot in the dark.
And if you go back to read my definition of supernatural the multiverse does not qualify. As I said the term itself in discussion is meaningless.