The joys of life without God

The reports are from patients themselves.

http://www.ijpsy.com/ver_archivo.php?volumen=4&numero=3&articulo=96&lang=EN

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

that's right

"on the part of the survivor that she is somehow not
the same person as pre-injury"

the notion of having a self has changed

even the author of the paper distinguishes the essence of this argument

"From an RFT perspective, there exist three senses of self that are directly
knowable by humans: the conceptualized self, self as an ongoing process of verbal
knowing, and self as context. Loss of sense of self may be understood as a crisis
of the conceptualized self."

we are talking about the self as context - you are talking about the conceptualized self - its quite obvious that the conceptualized self diminishes with brain damage and its quite obvious that the self as context doesn't (unless one is actually dead)

even a patient says
"I realized that I was no longer the person I used to be.
But could that be true? Where had that person gone?
And who was I now?"

thes sense of "I" is constant - the concept of who that "I" is subject to change ... even without brain damage you see that people go from babyhood to childhood, adolesence, adulthood and old age

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

So how does this lead you to the inescapable conclusion that "I" is something special and evocative of something other than a phenomenon of complexly organized and networked matter?

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Actually for the purposes of this thread I was advocating that empiricism is not capabale for determining the nature of god because it is not even sufficient for determining the nature of the self

If you want to advocate empirical methods as the only basis of evidence there is no room for proceeding

 

Yet. Just give it some time.

Well, given the definition of empirical, i.e. based on experiment and observation, I would have to say that all knowledge has empiricism at it's root. Wouldn't you?

Without observations and experiments on light's motion we'd still be talking about luminiferous ethers. Same goes for any accepted theory you can name. The base of, and the ultimate acceptance of any idea is founded on empiricism.

EDIT: With the obvious exception of religious ideas, which only require that they satisfy the human egotistical need to feel special in the universe.

The advancement of these ideas may be generated by intellectual self-reflection, but is always subject to an empirical reckoning. How else, and be specific, do you propose that accurate knowledge of the cosmos be garnered?

 

I'm reminded of the section in Dawkins book 'The God of the Gaps'. Theists have been using this tactic for centuries and after certain things are better understood, it leaves theists looking pretty dumb in retrospect. Conciousness is just something the theists interpretation is probably just as wrong, and if there is a day when we have a good understanding of 'conciousness', you (if you're still alive) will have some explaining to do, lightgigantic.

 

I suspect he would just pass it off as an epistemologically incorrect interpretation by materialistic scientists.

 

Heh... I forgot, if conciousness is eternal then I will have to listen to him going "told you so" after we're dead

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

Wouldn't that be a hoot?

 

Superluminal

If empiricism works by the process of seeing phenomena how much time do you think is required to come tot he point of seeing what you are seeing with?

- "just give it some time" is the atheistic equivelant of "goddunnit"

Spiritual knowledge has the added condition of purity of the beholder that is not addressed by empiricism - so in other words religious evidence boils down to the perception of saintly persons, much like the evidence in science(or rather the interpretation of evidence) boils down to the perception of persons deemed qualified

empricism works well on examininations of dull matter (as evidenced by a plethora of scientific discoveries and inventions in the field)

- it fails in consciousness studies however - for example a physicist could be a great coneissuer of pornography and read the evidence of physics just as accurately as a physicist composed of less lusty passions - a lusty person however cannot address the perception of even their own consciousness because they are impure ( a lusty person sees lust, a greedy person sees greed etc)

 

Fire

do you think that ignorance is a concomitant factor of empiricism or that human knowledge will come to the point of one day understanding absolutely everything?

 

doesn't matter how good a swimmer you are, if you are thrown in the middle of the pacific ocean its just a matter of time before you go down (unless of course you get picked up by a rescue craft)

 

only if I send it by email

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

LG, your arguments are useless because they presuppose the conclusion. You've already decided there's a god and that there is "dull" matter and what? "Special" matter. You have no need to resort to reality for support.

Your entire argument revolving around consciousness is that we haven't entirely figured it out yet, therefore it must be in the spiritual realm. Sorry, but that's just your own dull gray matter talking.

 

Well this is where it becomes difficult for lightgigantic, he denies much of physical reality (which his 'god' created) and he invents a non-physical reality. I wouldnt bet my house on the chances of him being right.

 

superluminal

Even a child can tell the difference between a living body and a dead one - according to current reductionist models of life there is no difference - if thats the reality you resort to you resort to a limited reality - choosing such a limited reality is akin to already choosing there is no god.

Your argument is that because we have evolved from manufacturing bullock carts to space shuttles its just a matter of time before everything becomes observable by reductionist paradigms - that is your dull grey matter speaking - how do you propose that a person comes to the point of seeing what they are seeing with?

 

Actually I work with standard definitions of physical reality - if you think that these standard definitions define consciousness it indicates that you are not working with them however

 

So as the house of cards has tumbled over the last few centuries (for the theists), there is one card standing, lightgigantic, and that card for you is the conciousness card. The reason this is a card you feel safe using is that the very same arguments I can use when stating this grouped term 'conciousness' is a physical reality, you can feel very safe in using the arguments against a non-physical reality.

If your only argument is that there is no proof that it is a physical reality, then someone with greater articulative skills than I, would put you in your place and show that there is actually plenty of evidence of that (the brain for one). But history is probably the greatest evidence. Why? Because the fantasies of theists (like you) have always turned out to be fantasy... hence your falling house of cards... Had this been the 17th century, you would just has actively been proposing the Earth being the centre of the universe... this is just the nature of the theist, wanting to donate themselves as much importance and selfworth as possible. Rather selfish and undesireable, isn't it? It's little wonder this mindset has seen a lot of religious related violence.

I have noticed you carefully select analogies and abstract terms that can't be proven either way. Seems to me you like to hide behind these barriers purely for the purposes of maintaining your irrationally held faith.

I'm still waiting for you to openly have a little doubit on the existence of a sentient creator. Have some credability and say that it is impossible to know...

 

Fire

if thats the case then the house of atheistic science has tumbled more quickly - we've only had about 50 to 70 years of serious industrial society leading the world and its an envirnomental and social mess - perhaps theism can come to the aid of science and give it a framework for direction instead of self destruction .....

the difference is that consciousness is perfectly defined and evidenced in scripture - if you want to term consciousnes as a physical entity (meaning something that operates out of the established paradigm of push/pull forces of electrons etc) its not clear even which direction you could say the progress of such a hypothesis lies

Someone like eccles?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carew_Eccles

This is a strange appeal to authority - you cannot even reference the authority

always? well lets see ....

never proposed by the vedas

actually the importance goes to god - true though - pride has a tendency to run parrallel in the heart so one can think "god is the greatest because I am the greatest", hence a focus on purity in theism

I think it would be more selfish to consider human intelligence as the the greatest thing in existence but denying god - and more undesirable too when you look at history (its a great evidence) and see of the foolishness committed by humans, both in the name of science and religion, when they develop a puffed up sense of self

(the ol war argument

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

)

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

What are the religious issues behind this piece of violence?

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

its also a mindset (I/we are the greatest) that has seen a lot of violence in the name of race, nation, economic development, society, justice and freedom too - does that mean we should renounce race, nation, economic development, society, justice and freedom too?

such as?

begs the question how do you know that it is impossible to know (are you omniscient?) - the problem with negative absolutes ("there is no way to know if something can be known") is they tend to elimate all possibilities except that statement itself and its difficult to understand what promotes that statement to a privledged status. (If it actually is impossible to know whether something can be known, how do you know that?)

 

So you're saying that there's no empirical evidence of (self)conscience? What an odd position. And wrong, of course.

Inference, for one thing. They figured out the error of the Hubble telescope by looking at pictures generated by it. But there's no reason to look at your own particular consciousness. We can observe others instead.

Unless you're alluding to sollipsism, in which case you're looking for philosophical proof, not scientific evidence.

Just because you personally are ignorant of the mechanisms involved doesn't mean that it isn't mechanistic. Your personal incredulence carries no weight at all as a formal argument. You wouldn't dream to suggest to a mathematician that wavelet analysis is "magic", just because you don't understand it. Why should the evolution of the universe be special?

Now, there are, of course, plenty of complex structures that do not need intelligence for us to explain them. Stars, for instance, have tremendously complex structures and are essentially explainable as immense amount of hydrogen under the effects of gravity. Such self-organizing systems are all around us, and require no intelligence at all.

Of course, new knowledge leads to new questions. But the more things are found to be explainable by scientific means, the more contrived the religious argument becomes. You wouldn't argue that a thunder god creates lightning, today. But lightning would have been proof of the gods' power in ancient times. Frankly, I think it a very silly argument to make that our increased scientific knowledge of the universe should lead to a conviction that the religious position is strengthened.

Contrary to the old adage, I do not think that religion and science are entirely orthogonal. Increased scientific knowledge lessens the need for religious explanations.