One doesn't think about electrical impulses when they are making love, for example..
At least, I never have
Dude, you are so missing out! You need more toys!
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You can not find God as a physical being
- Thread starter Spirit of Light
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Dude, you are so missing out! You need more toys!
If you're going to find gods, I don't think you'll find them anywhere else ─ opinion appears to agree with the evidence that they don't have objective existence.
That would fit a god who was a personal construct, an idealization, no? And no doubt that could be helpful to inward exploration for people of a particular temperament, though I don't think it'd work for everyone.
Back in my teens I remember pondering what a soul could be, and came up with the image of daylight (white light) becoming colored by passing through a stained glass window, as an analogy for the divine (the light) and the self; though when I thought it through, it seemed to result in a kind of external animism. Ah youth!
TagliatelliMonster
Veteran Member
It isn't. In fact, it's the only thing relevant in this context.
You're trying to attribute it an undemonstrable, unverifiable entity which is indistinguishable from imagination.
So it's extremely relevant to point out that the actual evidence points to the brain as its source instead.
And the brain demonstrably exists.
And every single verifiable example of "consciousness" that we have, comes with a physical brain.
To the point that altering brain states results in altered consciousness.
And damaged brains result in damaged consciousness.
And braindead results in no consciousness.
Meanwhile, you can't even show that the entity you wish to attribute it to, is even real.
So yes, I consider it extremely relevant to the point at hand.
muhammad_isa
Veteran Member
It is not just about personal beliefs or creeds
A person who has a Doctorate in Divinity will know more than a person who has no knowledge of scriptures.
TagliatelliMonster
Veteran Member
Dude, you are so missing out! You need more toys!
FYI: it seems you messed up a bit with the quoting. You attributed it to me but it was @muhammad_isa who said that.
TagliatelliMonster
Veteran Member
Beliefs are always personal.
I can have a "doctorate" in Lord of the Rings, but that won't make Middle Earth a real place.
muhammad_isa
Veteran Member
That shows that we can only see that which is apparent.
If you chop somebody's head off, they are dead
What is real?
If you believe that your physical senses are all that you have, then you are fooling yourself.
Do you "trash" psychology as a science, for example?
Whoops! I did. I was going to reply to one of your posts and decided not to. The tag must have still been in the reply box when I quoted @muhammad_isa's post.
I fixed it.
TagliatelliMonster
Veteran Member
That shows that we can only see that which is apparent.
If you chop somebody's head off, they are dead
Nice dodge of the obvious.
This is like a used car salesman who sells me a car under the pretext of it being "in good condition" and then me finding out that it won't even start. And then the salesman telling me "but what is in good condition"?
You kinda loose by default when you have to go down that route to defend your claims.
What is your point with this?
Not seeing the relevancy at all.
Perhaps you should actually reply to the points I raised instead of moving the goalposts, trying to change the subject and acting like an amateur dodgeball player.
I know. I'm assuming my thoughts are somewhat similar to mine in relation to a description based on chemical compounds, etc, being inadequate or misleading. But perhaps I'm wrong on that. I shouldn't assume.
firedragon
Veteran Member
No no. That was a different angle.
Anyway, so your thoughts are what? You mean to say that you dont wish to explain it. And you thought it was reductionist.
Well, if its reductionist or not would depend on a persons epistemology. There are many who makes various types of arguments without understanding themselves and having a coherence. A lot of people are such reductionists in addressing others but move his propositions across all philosophical positions as convenient cherry picking as he goes through them.
muhammad_isa
Veteran Member
Neither did you answer the question..
The relevancy is obvious .. at least, it is to me.
Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts.
How does it help us to understand a person's feeling or behaviour in "terms" of electrical impulses?
It doesn't.
It might help in Psychiatry, but that is a different field.
I agree with those words, but perhaps not in the way you meant it. I explained earlier on this thread that I discovered that what people are referring to when they say that they experience God or the Spirit is that they experience their own mental states and misinterpret what they are. A lot of mysteries get cleared up with just that realization.
Your beliefs seem to be good enough for everybody you communicate with on these threads as best I can tell. They'll tell you that they are not their beliefs and why, but I doubt they care if you hold them. If my neighbor wants to circle a tree at midnight under a full moon that he bays at as he shakes a stick with a chicken claw nailed to it because he says that it centers him and gives his life purpose, great. Go for it. Just keep the noise down. Why would I mind? And yes, his beliefs are not "good enough" for me, no matter how he explains them.
Are you certain that you're not guilty of that yourself here? I suspect that all of this talk about God is doing the distorting. I have long suspected that there is an unseen information field that we are connected to, one which is modified over time as conscious experience in sentient creatures continues, and modifies them as well with indistinct information. I was reading Rupert Sheldrake at the time, a controversial thinker considered a crackpot by many, who proposed the idea of morphic fields to serve as repositories of information: "I came to the conclusion that for understanding the development of plants, their morphogenesis, genes and gene products are not enough. Morphogenesis also depends on organizing fields. The same arguments apply to the development of animals. Since the 1920s many developmental biologists have proposed that biological organization depends on fields, variously called biological fields, or developmental fields, or positional fields, or morphogenetic fields."
I first had this intuition when thinking about why calculus went uninvented for millennia until two men invented it contemporaneously and seemingly independently. I wondered if there times when it was in the air to do that, that the conditions for making this discovery weren't in place in Euclid's time. To believe it would be to accept an unsupported idea as truth, the definition of faith. To present it as a nagging feeling of uncertain value is not.
I also find it counterintuitive to try to assign the genetic code the duty of transmitting instincts to the next generation. What sequence of GTCA codes for the suckling instinct? Which amino acids need to be strung together to make a fawn stand up? I've always assumed that there was a different mechanism for transmitting ideas than the one used to code for proteins.
I'll go further with this, something I recently read at Black holes store information as holograms at the event horizon, says Stephen Hawking
"Quantum mechanics dictates that anything – that is, matter and energy – can be broken down into information, strings of 1s and 0s for instance. A consequence of this rule is that information should never disappear, not even if the matter or energy it’s linked to is being sucked by a black hole. This hypothesis, however, contradicts Einstein’s theory of general relativity which suggests the information should be destroyed by a black hole. This is the information paradox, as physicists call it. Hawking says that the information isn’t destroyed by a black hole because it never makes through inside. Instead, it’s trapped at the event horizon – the boundary in spacetime through which matter and light can only pass inward towards the mass of the black hole. At this boundary layer, the information is stored as a 2D hologram or super translation. A hologram is a 2D description of a 3D object."
My jaw dropped. Is this that field? Look at how much this resembles the concept of God - a collection of all information about whatever has gotten close enough to the event horizon to leave more information there, that sits on the threshold of two worlds, ours, and one cut off to us within the event horizon, like a deity straddling the realms of the seeable and the unseeable. Maybe this is what we intuit. Maybe we have a direct communication with this field, perhaps due to quantum entanglement, where changes in the status of the information store correlate instantly with changes in brains and minds. Perhaps this is why people are seeing gods in their own minds. Perhaps others are intuiting this same thing, but not invoking deities or even consciousness, as I might have.
Yes, I realize that this is highly speculative, like multiverses, but it is a completely different formulation for how the universe might be and why the intuition of a god is so common but not universal. I also realize that if correct, it would force me to modify my idea that the experience of a god is created by the mind, into something closer to what the theists propose - a direct communion with something that is not me, and so far cannot be observed outside of minds.
What is the value of ideas such as these? I don't think they can be applied directly to life except possibly to help one stop looking in the wrong places and in the wrong way for answers that never come.
In part.
But you wont find love looking at that scale, just chemicals. Nor will you find it at the largest scales. From the International Space station, love on earth is also invisible. But not life. At the scale of a galaxy, though, there is no sign of life, even if the galaxy you are observing is teeming with it.
Life and mind aren't visible at the molecular (or galactic) scale. They emerge from the complexity of the chemicals interacting in a sentient organism considered collectively, just as you won't find Shakespeare in a pile of letters. It would be equally absurd to describe Shakespeare in terms of letters, punctuation, and spaces. Those things and their organization must be considered collectively as passages of writing with conventional (artificial, agreed upon) meaning, which aslo emerge as words are gathered into phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs (or stanzas), scenes, acts, and plays.
Here's that reductionist objection again. There is no know reason why the contents of consciousness cannot be understood as a natural phenomenon arising from the physical elements of the brain. To refer to them as electrical impulses is the same as referring to Shakespeare as letters and love as chemicals. Your scale is too small. These things need to be considered collectively, and their organization considered to understand that these are all emergent phenomena that emerge at scales larger than their constituent components.
You also won't find wetness in any water molecule. Wetness, and liquid itself, are emergent phenomena experienced at a larger scale as an emergent property of a collection of water molecules at a particular temperature.
The OP was a theist telling us (atheists included) how reality is, a reality that he assumes includes a god, and asking, "Any thoughts?" What were you expecting the answer to be, and why do you think that that is not sticking to the OP? In my opinion, the OP is wrong to make such assumptions, and alternative explanations for why God cannot be found except within were offered.
I think you are being hyperbolic in your description of the thread being atheists telling theists they make zero sense. I've not seen anything stronger from skeptics here than a refutation of a specific claim. In my case, I suggested that what he was calling God that could only be found within his own mind (although now I am offering an alternate interpretation), and gave an explanation why that was common in human history (muses), and makes sense here as well - nothing like the way you describe such activity here. I am sticking to what makes this topic interesting - to me, anyway.
What's interesting about faith-based beliefs? To me, nothing. What's interesting is why people hold them. The OP believes there's a God out there that the mind can experience directly using intuition, but is not otherwise detectable. What's interesting about that to the skeptic? It's just another faith-based belief. To this skeptic, what is interesting is that that is also the description of the self. I know myself the way the OP says he knows God. I have an intuition that there is a subject apprehending the content of my consciousness, one I can't see (the eye doesn't see itself), and one not discernible to anybody but me. What else fits that description? What else can only be seen by looking within? Just the sense of self, one's own mind, and God?
You mentioned interesting. I find this more interesting than discussing why we can't find gods out there. Hopefully, you can find something interesting in some of this as well.
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firedragon
Veteran Member
Irrelevant to you. But thanks for the effort.
muhammad_isa
Veteran Member
All very well, but I doubt whether psychologists would find
your "thesis" of any use
Altfish
Veteran Member
[QUOTE="firedragon, post: 7444445, member: 45358" ]Faith statement.[/QUOTE]
No it is not.
[QUOTE="firedragon, post: 7444445, member: 45358" ]No problem. Not knowing is not a problem. But if you dont know, dont first make faith based statements, then say I dont know.[/QUOTE]
I didn't. The ideas were put there as a pretext to my "I don't know" statement
[QUOTE="firedragon, post: 7444445, member: 45358" ]Of course not. Who told you that?[/QUOTE]
What other explanation are you proposing? If it is "I don't know" that's fine
No it is not.
[QUOTE="firedragon, post: 7444445, member: 45358" ]No problem. Not knowing is not a problem. But if you dont know, dont first make faith based statements, then say I dont know.[/QUOTE]
I didn't. The ideas were put there as a pretext to my "I don't know" statement
[QUOTE="firedragon, post: 7444445, member: 45358" ]Of course not. Who told you that?[/QUOTE]
What other explanation are you proposing? If it is "I don't know" that's fine
Altfish
Veteran Member
OK, so what are you referring to in your explanation?
Altfish
Veteran Member
Because that just leads to the question, "Where does god come from?"
firedragon
Veteran Member
Then, could you provide scientific or some other kind of empirical evidence?
From your paradigm, if not, its just a faith statement.
Opinion among some. pantheists find the divine in the physical.
That's a wonderful and unique image which expresses what I believe.