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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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May 13, 2010 - 04:42am PT
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"This is what fundamentalist materialists believe - that to be real, we must refer to some thing with measurable matter, even though QM tells us there is no such thing as matter in an absolute sense."
This is incorrect. EDIT: On several levels, too.
re: mechanistic nature of living things and mind-brain relationship
"Materialists" in regard to biology and living things believe (that is, mentally hold) that flesh and blood drives flesh and blood. What's more they believe molecular biology and biochemistry drive flesh and blood. From a different perspective, they believe there is no ghost in the body machine (as centuries of religious leaders believed and taught their congregations). From a different perspective, "materialists" believe mind (mental function incl consciousness) is what the brain does.
Here it is from a different perspective still: spiritual discarnationists believe "life works through matter but is independent of it." Wbraun comes to mind here. This belief is in direct opposition to what the materialist believes.
There is no such thing as "fundamentalist materialist." That is bogus language, a play on words. At least so it would be from many emerging perspectives, models and contexts. Mine, too.
----
This is all faux scholastic hot air and is very much behind the curve per consciousness models and how consciousness "works." If you're going to jump into a conversation about "God" and consciousness you need to bring your A-game lest you'll have to sit in the corner with the pointy hat on.
The model provided above, as bore out through the history of philosophy, is actually reductionism, more specifically, material reductionism (or a sub set of "physicalism"), where consciousness can be "reduced" to atomic or chemical processes which "produce" said consciousness. That is, consciousness is a "product" or function of atomic and chemical processes, ergo, consciousness is what the brain "does."
People argue that the above, in considering consciousness as a meta-function of lower, and more fundamental chemical/atomic activities, you've introduced a kind of "ghost in the machine" that most of us laugh at as a viable concept. You can't have it both ways, runs the argument. You can't be a material reductionist, who believes that everything is no more than a sum of it's measurable parts, and at the same time say this or that (consciousness) is a function or by-product that is different than, more than, or above and beyond the basic chemical/atomic "parts" themeselves.
In other words, the only way material reductionism can stay logically viable is for everything to be the same thing. Ergo, a Fender Stratocaster is the very same thing as Jimi Hendrix's "Cry of Love," and that the Strat "created" the tune. I trust you see the problem with this.
Put in jug head terms, conscious is not something the brain does, consciousness is what the brain is. The brain doesn't produce consciousness in the old style, linear causal model. That's a cognitive style transposed or projected onto the question of God and consciousness.
"Fundamentalist Materialist" simply means that a fundamentalist cognitive mode (rigid adherence to a set of principals believed to be absolutely "correct") is applied to matter as the end-all, be all.
The subtle thing to realize here is not all the fancy justifications, but that material reductionism, which doesn't rule out emergent phenomena, nevertheless holds to an archaic form of linear causality that has much more to do with a certain cognitive style (the way a person feels comfortable thinking), and has almost nothing to do with how consciousness "is."
Bottom line: The fly in the ointment is a linear concept causality, which is really just a reflection of left brain, evaluating mind mode. Move into right brain mode and time vanishes, a phenomenon most evident in trauma research - but that's another story.
More later.
JL
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Norton
Social climber
the Wastelands
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May 13, 2010 - 10:24am PT
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What would Lois say?
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Jaybro
Social climber
Wolf City, Wyoming
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May 13, 2010 - 10:29am PT
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Beats taking responsibiilty- "I could have avoided getting behind on my mortgage, but it was god's plan."
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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May 13, 2010 - 12:11pm PT
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Pate- Covering at least four so-called "deep" subjects in as many sentences, short ones, how's this...
(1) Jehovah is a deification. (2) Nature is physics and chemistry (3) Meat is sentient. (4) Stop whining, suck it up and deal with it.
P.S.
Pate, btw, I do expect double duty from you in the good fight ala parody against ol time supernaturalist nonsense now that Weschrist is on sabbatical.
And Norton, knock it off with the little one-liners, give us some essays to sink our teeth into.
Jaybro- if we're being religious and balanced sounds like a perfectly reasonable explanation to me.
JL- I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on the more profound subjects. But I dig your climbing books.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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May 13, 2010 - 12:22pm PT
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(3) Meat is sentient.
There you have it IMO. Or half of it. Because the opposite is true as well.
Consciousness is meat.
This harks back to the old Zen maxim that "form is emptiness and emptiness is form, exactly." Put still differently, matter is energy and energy is matter, exactly.
Oddly, it looks as though everything is everything else. Remember David Boehm and all that hologram shite he was running in the 70s?
Pate - It's only complicated on the level of forms and matter, as any Quantum Mechanic or psychologist or poet can tell you. At the deeper level of being or emptiness, life just flows...
Gotta rock the matter and the spirit, and anytime you go cragging, you are, you just can't "prove" it, a process that lies strictly in the material, form, matter realm.
JL
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Binks
climber
Uranus
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May 13, 2010 - 01:06pm PT
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HFCS and Largo -- for me it was an epic realization that material reductionism was being misapplied outside it's proper context. You need believe nothing "supernatural", quite the contrary. It started for me with ecology. I was studying ecosystems. Within them you see all kinds of "emergent phenomena". Stuff that performs with what seems like intelligence thru feedback loops. I studied things like the "faint young sun paradox", the carbon cycle and composition of the earth's atmosphere as regulated by the biosphere.
The whole thing can be turned on it's head you see. And once you turn it on it's head you will realize that in being indoctrinated to disbelieve anything but scientific materialism we have been blinded. Coordinating intelligence (i.e. teleological processes) exist as "epiphenomena" and in these contexts material reductionism is simply false. This realization is of course heretical to material reductionism, yet it's clear in these large scale ecosystem contexts that reductionism is absurd. All kinds of coordination is happening that has to be generated by random chance if you're going to hold to the reductive model. We westerners have been trained in a way that we "can't see the forest for the trees" and have grossly misapplied material reductionism so far out of context that we have created a kind of insanity on this planet.
If you're interested in this stuff, I recommend Lewis Thomas "The lives of a cell".
Of course once you take this realization out of the context of ecology, the entire thing just keeps opening up. This stuff has been misapplied all over and the limitation to our thinking and modeling has suffered greatly. We now need to grow beyond these limitations. Probably our survival depends on it too.
I leave you with a quote from Dune:
"Any path that narrows future possibilities may become a lethal trap. Humans are not threading their way through a maze; they scan a vast horizon filled with unique opportunities. The narrowing viewpoint of the maze should appeal only to creatures with their noses buried in the sand."
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Klimmer
Mountain climber
San Diego
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May 13, 2010 - 03:08pm PT
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As the The Police song goes . . .
We are Spirits . . .
in the Material World.
Are Spirits . . .
in the Material World.
. . .
When we die our souls return to our Creator. The Bible says this, and I firmly believe this. What we do, or do not do on this Earth matters.
Some say that our Soul has the mass of approximately 21.0g.
Could be true. More research needs to be done in this area.
Dr. Duncan MacDougall, the human soul has a mass of 21.0g:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duncan_MacDougall_(doctor)
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Anastasia
climber
hanging from a crimp and crying for my mama.
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May 13, 2010 - 03:11pm PT
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Just because I can't see gravity doesn't mean I am not influenced by it. To me God is something similar.
AFS
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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May 14, 2010 - 12:19am PT
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my problem is not with god so much as belief, which seems to be a very compulsive thing in western tradition. you HAVE to believe. if i believe, i HAVE to testify about it. all you have to do is believe, and you will be saved. (lots of believers with other weaknesses in dante's inferno.)
i think we all have to agree that it's pretty hard to prove whether there's a god or not. might be one. might not. even if you believe, i think you have to admit this is the common state of knowledge on the subject. people claim to have special insights, but i never find them very convincing. their insights, to me, seem to be the product of their desire.
so why not leave god an open question? who knows, maybe we'll learn more about it all in a few years. maybe someone remarkable will come along--seems kinda foolish to think it all went down thousands of years ago and we're just here making time until god tells us, "that's all, folks."
if there is a divinity, i think our cues about it come from this wonderful universe. we know so much more about it today than did the writers of bibles, korans and sutras. there's more to be learned from the present than in these frozen concepts of the past.
on the other hand, the desire for a god, and life after death, which is a close companion to it, seems to be intrinsic in the human adventure. it has had many expressions. we can learn from them too--they're part of the biology and the universe as well.
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Robb
Social climber
The other "Magic City on the Plains"
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May 14, 2010 - 10:54am PT
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HFCS
Thank you for your concise answer. From a given perspective it makes perfect sense. My question wasn't meant to be a platitude. Nearly all of the times I have asked this over the years I've only received rants for answers. Refreshing to hear a well constructed arguement.
Thanks again,
Robb
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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May 14, 2010 - 01:10pm PT
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Dr. F wrote:
"Its so much bigger than our mind can understand, to make it all about God is just demonstrating how small you think the universe is:
Another word/concept for "God," reaching back to early history, is "The All," which, quite naturally, includes the Universe and everything in it - and nothing at all.
That has led some people to tell us that both the universe and God are infinitely larger than the content and evaluating capacities of our minds; and more importantly, that our minds themselves (not the content or processing aperati) are not only "no-thing," they are infinite.
So the question becomes: Is it possible for you to imagine that both mind and God are not "things," or "something?"
Again, at this point we're simply engaging in a thought experiment. We're checking our willingness to imagine God and Mind as "no thing," we're not asking you to believe something, to stop analyzing or provide a construct or definition of anything.
The next step is easy.
JL
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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May 14, 2010 - 01:57pm PT
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The problem here seems to be the definition of god. What is it?
The difficulty,logically, is the notion of an individulaized, eternal consciousness that has the ability to empathize and interact directly and personally with our lives, I don't see the evidence for such a being.
On the other hand if you say god is simply a final term as in "energy is god as it is eternal and can neither be created nor destroyed" well, that I might buy.
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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May 14, 2010 - 03:29pm PT
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dr. f, there are a number of "proofs" of the existence of god--the cosmological argument, the ontological argument, and i'm sure others. "learned" some of it from the jebbies, but, in retrospect, it's sophistry.
my argument is that, believe it or not, everyone is pretty much in the same boat with the god business. there's only so much to be known, and we're not going to get satisfaction. when you get to that point, either you're going to say, "i'm an atheist" or "i believe". i add them together and divide by a common denominator.
i would like to inject an element of comparative religion into this. most of the people in this thread seem to have a rather christian take on the subject. from my point of view, y'all are in the tradition of mideastern monotheism. it begins with egyptian culture in what you might call the first "comfortable" civilization where life cut people enough slack to pursue these things. it's about mummies and their pantheon as much as it is about akhenaten and his "heresy," which sigmund freud so brilliantly suggested took the form of an egyptian moses leading "god's chosen people" to a promised land a generation later. not much of a god, really, when you compare the farming in egypt to that in palestine, but this is the burning preoccupation which infects the west, and i include islam in this because i think they actually have a much more realistic take on that theology, if you happen to like that theology, which i don't.
when people ask me my religion, i always tell them navajo. walk in beauty. with a coda from john keats's most famous line.
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Binks
climber
Uranus
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May 14, 2010 - 03:42pm PT
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To call any blind man, closed minded, rigid in belief, fixed in thinkin what they want, not able to think beyond their experiences
Is the exact opposite of the truth for ANY blind man,
we have thought about reality, the evidence, our experiences,, other peoples experiences, read books, listened to authorities on both sides of the argument, and came up with a decision,
we do not believe that sight exists
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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May 14, 2010 - 03:54pm PT
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Dr. F wrote:
What is God then??
You can chase words around if you want, and God can be nothing to you, or not
But In this universe
Nothing = No God
Dood, you dodged answering the thought experiment, so I will put it to you once more: Is it possible for you to imagine that "God" is not a thing?
Once more, I am not asking you for an "answer," a description, to believe anything, to think a certain thought or not think a thought. You don't have to provide anything. You merely have to show a willingness to imagine. Nothing more.
Paul said: "The problem here seems to be the definition of god. What is it?
I would add that the "problem" is our insistence that God "be" exactly what we want him to be - another article for our evaluating minds to judge and to "know" in the standard way. Dr. F mentioned "running around after words," when in fact his quest to find God is merely running around after things. Are we surprised that he doesn't find them?
JL
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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May 14, 2010 - 04:10pm PT
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another aspect of the god question is this: is western theology barking up the wrong tree?
again, from my point of view, which began with a heavily catholic education, the standard western god flunks on two counts: human sexuality and war.
face it, sexuality is essential to more complex forms of life and it's tremendously powerful. i would conclude that it probably reflects whatever is at the heart of it all. so-called pagan theologies all recognized this, but christianity seems to dodge it and give us a lopsidedly male god, with the further obfuscation of trinitarianism, and a pretty much non-erotic mother goddess. seems pretty far afield from the lives we all live.
and then there's war, oh prince of peace. darwin explains that much, much better.
as i understand it, the latest cosmology, based on the recent discovery of planets in other solar systems, indicates that earth is a rare bird indeed. biochemists and biophysicists seem to feel that evolution here took place due to a very fortuitous and narrow set of circumstances--water ice from out mars way coming in to where it could melt, and the early earth getting punched by something which became our rather unusual moon. maybe one planet like this per galaxy. sorry, hollywood.
fred hoyle, the cambridge astrophysicist who coined "big bang", was an avowed atheist until he began to understand the triple alpha process of carbon fusion, a rather unusual thing in the thermonuclear realm, to the point where he declared, carbon being so essential to life, "the universe is a set-up job".
hey, all this is way over my head too, but i think the heart of the god question is closer to this than anything you'll ever hear in a church.
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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May 14, 2010 - 04:31pm PT
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to JL:
"truth is the highest god" -- gandhi
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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May 14, 2010 - 05:06pm PT
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Another interesting thought experiment for materialists is this: Describe what you would like God to be in terms of capacities, attributes, and so on.
This is especially interesting because it commonly exposes a person's fixations, and the ego and rational mind's enormous resistance to the idea of "God." What the NLP folks used to call, "Stuck in a perspective."
JL
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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May 14, 2010 - 06:08pm PT
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well, since no one asked:
"beauty is truth and truth beauty; that's all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." -- keats, ode to a grecian urn (it's why we all have to study it in high school)
"how do i know, the bible tells me so." -- dale evans, whom i encountered at the lone pine film festival, a couple years before she passed away. she was a living example that it's possible to be an octogenarian and pretty. the truth was in her good looks.
binks, i've been looking for something to read. will order both "lives of a cell" and "dune". muchas gracias.
and my recc: simon conway-morris, several books on evolutionary biology. if you take sides in this debate, he's for you believers. he has a great debate going with the late stephen jay gould, who was for you atheists. add 'em up. divide by the common denominator.
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Karl Baba
Trad climber
Yosemite, Ca
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May 14, 2010 - 06:24pm PT
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Largo wrote
I would add that the "problem" is our insistence that God "be" exactly what we want him to be - another article for our evaluating minds to judge and to "know" in the standard way. Dr. F mentioned "running around after words," when in fact his quest to find God is merely running around after things. Are we surprised that he doesn't find them?
Nice. This is the big problem with many of the well intentioned gurus of atheism and their arguments...They shoot down a image of God left over from old cultures and their projections.
Science claims everything is made of the same vibrating energy. All is ONE ENERGY in science ultimately. It is obviously capable of manifesting in intelligent ways. You can start with that, call it God and let the search refine itself from there.
Is there LOVE? How to prove it? God is similarly elusive even if there are symptoms. If you were lost in a dream some night, how would you prove to the other dream characters that they were in an unreal world and merely the creation of some middle-aged guy made of meat lying in a bed in California?
Every religion in the world can be full of crap and it would prove nothing of God or lack of God, much in the way that 100 5 year olds could meet and try to agree on what sex is, or what it is like to be an adult and never come close.
It's a mystery that can be explored within but proof without will evade us. The game doesn't work that way.
If you take the time, open your mind and heart, and seek the truth without preconception, some awakening will inform you and an inner evolution begins. You can't prove this to others but it serves your life every minute and disbelieving it becomes a joke.
Peace
Karl
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