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BS: Your Brain, Your Brain on God
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Subject: RE: BS: Your Brain, Your Brain on God From: Mrrzy Date: 25 Sep 11 - 11:34 PM Well, when my body resolved itself around my point of light, the point of light had been located where my hindbrain ended up being. That is, my face was a little in front of it and my ankles, knees and hips were progressively farther away in the other direction. It felt as if my body kind of reappeared around me, and as it did, it did it from the back of the inside of my brain outwards and then down my body. Or, my awareness refilled my body flowing out from my hindbrain first forward into my face and then backward/outward to my toes. But since it was my awareness, that isn't how it was experienced. It took me a long time to figure out that the reason I stayed so deeply fainted and with no peripheral pulse is that it was the only time I'd fainted kind of uphill and stayed that way till I was lifted onto the gurney, at which point I must have seemingly suddenly awakened. To me, it was more that I was able to tell them that I was awake. I don't faint any more from needles, or from the idea of needles, which was all this had been, can you believe it? |
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Subject: RE: BS: Your Brain, Your Brain on God From: Amos Date: 25 Sep 11 - 10:52 PM Interesting indeed!! Only one thing about it puzzles me. You concluded you had spent this period "in your hindbrain" and I am not clear what that means to you. How did that seem to you. at the time? Did you know what it was at the time? Thanks for going to the trouble of describing what you experienced. Very interesting. A |
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Subject: RE: BS: Your Brain, Your Brain on God From: Ed T Date: 25 Sep 11 - 10:19 PM A very interesting experience, Mrrzy. Thanks for saring it with us. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Your Brain, Your Brain on God From: Mrrzy Date: 25 Sep 11 - 09:38 PM What evidence is there that thought exists separate from the *body*, including the brain? I used to faint. Once I fainted very deeply because the idiots at work in whose presence I fainted on stairs going up didn't lower my head or raise my feet, and when I was awake again I had been hiding in my hindbrain for a lot of the time. Long story if you want to read it: I fainted at work, like I said, and that they had time wonder what to do, decide to call 911, and for an ambulance to get there and for the EMTS still not to be able to find a pulse, and the reason I know this is that I was there. That is, pretty soon after fainting and so for most of this "I" had "come to" but "I" wasn't there, I was a point of light with intelligence. I remember thinking "there should be stimuli impinging" and then immediately "that's redundant. There should be stimuli" and there was nothing. I thought this was interesting. Then after a while, all of a sudden, I could hear voices and understand them and knew that they were speaking English, who they were, *and* the sound was coming from something felt as "above" but had no other sensations, nor did I seem to have a body but I didn't really notice that in particular at the time. I was too busy believing I was talking, remembering my boyfriend's phone number by visualizing the dial (with no eyes, which I noticed later also by realizing that it had never once occured to me that I had them to open, so I never tried), and then thought I was telling the phone# to the people (turns out I never made a sound or motion or breath, although I *did* remember the #). I didn't really wonder why I didn't hear them responding, by now I had realized kind of in so many words that I had no body but was now a point of light with rays mostly, well, radiating out in a circle, not a sphere, and they "felt" about a foot long. While everone was waiting for the ambulance, I kind of tuned them out as interesting things were happening around my radiating point of light. I slowly came to realize that my there was cold somewhere very close by, which kind of came to feel as if it were on my face, leading me to conclude aha! I have a must have a face! a while before what I actually felt *being* a face. By then the cold was also hard, and it kind of felt refreshing, both in the temperature and in the feeling of something firmly pressing into my face (a cold wet washcloth? how nice of them!). Eventually, through the same process of first feeling cold, then cold hard hardness, at several points that resolved themselves into a kind of line down which a kind of awareness went from my point of light-with-hearing-and-a-face-with-something-cold-being-pressed-against-it going farther away and in the other direction from where the face-feeling was coming from (there was a lot of spatial awareness). First they arranged themselves along a plane, then slowly (there was a lot of time without changes before the next development throughout) which also first identified themselves somehow as ankle, knee and hip before I felt that I actually *had* these joints. I had also concluded from their planar arrangement that they there was actually only one cold hard planar thing pressed against all these joints, so I it was likely the cold floor and I was likely to be lying on it, but when it actually eventually resolved itself into *feeling* as if I inhabited a body which was lying on the cold hard ground I was surprised to realize that my face was also pressed into the ground and it wasn't a washcloth after all. So I lost contact between my core consciousness and my motor and sensory systems, including feedback loops that should have told my I wasn't speaking, and when my body reassembled itself around me, I had been in my hindbrain. At least, that was where that which had been "me" which was being experienced as a point of light with hearing-and-all-that-comes-with-it, including understanding one ENT saying to the other that she couldn't find a pulse, and him answering "hey! I think she was my TA!" with pleasure in his voice so "I" "relaxed" since if he'd made it through my course with happy memories he was a hard worker and smart and nice. I didn't finish waking up till I was on the guerney heading out. From this I concluded, personally that hearing evolved first, and it evolved to tell you where atmospheric disturbances were coming from, or rather locate other organisms causing them, so you could locomote appropriately. Language, using this core faculty, came with. I wonder if I'd been a deaf signer how long it would have taken me to have hands again. Anyway, I also think that detection of temperature developed next, then detection of hardness, and that we evolved from navigating in a flat, 2d world of head/tail and limbs while perceiving "above" and below" (just not locomoting into them) into a full-fledged 3-D world of up/down front/back left-right later. This isn't exactly ontogeny that recapitulated phylogeny, but consciogeny, I guess. Basically, once they got me on the gurney and lowered my head my vasovagal response went off and I was fine, but they took me to the ER anyway AND never called my boyfriend (since I still thought I'd told them to) so it was a whole ordeal getting home... but it was, absolutely and without question, incredibly interesting and informative. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Your Brain, Your Brain on God From: Ed T Date: 25 Sep 11 - 05:40 PM ""The idea that there is a consciousness outside the human perception by the brain is an argument that has no basis in scientific fact"" I suspect that clearly leaves out a large number of living entities on earth,(the non human forms), and the possibility that non human life could possibly exist elsewhere(not yet detected by lifeforms currently on Earth). That does not seem too "sciency" to me. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Your Brain, Your Brain on God From: Bill D Date: 25 Sep 11 - 04:50 PM "different spheres" "There is a lot of experiential data that indicates that thought occurs separately from the brain,..." And this data, by definition, only exists when it is being contemplated? Or do we have an equivocation on what is or is not 'data'? Is experiential data different from experimental data? Is the past tense of 'think'....'*thunk*? "Oh what a tangled web we weave When first we practice to ...perceive." Sorry, my |
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Subject: RE: BS: Your Brain, Your Brain on God From: Amos Date: 25 Sep 11 - 03:34 PM Frank: Your conviction that mind and brain are synonymous, more or less, is interesting. There is a lot of experiential data that indicates that thought occurs separately from the brain, such as the various OOB experiences and NDE's that have been discussed here in different threads. Just upthread from here there is a link to a case of a man who was totally flat-lined--brain-dead as far as the instruments could tell--but who was called back to life by pleas from his wife. I am just saying that your hard-over conclusion might be a bit premature. There are a lot of possible reasons for not wanting to consider anything spiritual about an individual and to lock onto the materialist interpretation, but I don't think they are good reasons. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Your Brain, Your Brain on God From: Amos Date: 25 Sep 11 - 03:29 PM <1>=Something that's true is, in theory, open to verification by anybody who takes the trouble to look far enough into it. Well that's perfectly valid for the material universe, whose agreements are deeply embedded in every mind. In the individual's own universe of created things--his own ideas and his dreams and visions and goals and so on--things are true which are true for him, and may be perfectly true despite disagreement from thousands of others. In that sphere, using agreement to over-ride an individual's sense of truth can be destructive and unconscionable. In the universe of agreements among people outside the physical universe, such as cultural agreements on beauty and correct conduct, for example, truth is a much slipperier commodity. These different spheres have their own data and their own "truth". I would not want to be too arrogant about which is "more valid" than which, although it is pretty obvious that the material sphere is the most widely shared. A |
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Subject: RE: BS: Your Brain, Your Brain on God From: Stringsinger Date: 25 Sep 11 - 12:23 PM Amos, at the risk of a tautology, mind is brain, not outside. When brain is gone, mind is gone for that person. As to reality, it is variable and that's why I am a FreeThinker, not wedded to absolutes about what reality is. The idea that there is a consciousness outside the human perception by the brain is an argument that has no basis in scientific fact, either by consensus through scientists who have evolved to that point of view through testing and verification or by examining the perceptions of those who claim otherwise. Darwin, like any scientific " theorums" (using Dawkin's term here) is evolving in the manner of Darwin's own dangerous idea (with a bow to Dennett). What makes this dangerous for those advocating an absolute, here, based on some mystical or theoretical idea is that reality is evolving, not cast in concrete, as we know more about how our universe operates. Genes, however, we are finding are real as we can possibly define the term and create the building blocks for the brain and hence thinking and the mind. In the meantime, the language has degenerated to include the capitalization of such words as "Consciousness", a "Creator", and "Spiritual" which defy precise definitions so as to be like the character in Alice and Wonderland who says, "It means exactly what I say it means.", which is pure sophistry. An intelligent discussion requires a unanimity of terms and not some vague wandering into a never-never land of meaning. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Your Brain, Your Brain on God From: Lighter Date: 25 Sep 11 - 11:56 AM > ... there's only a one in a billion chance that what they're seeing is a statistical fluke. >But that doesn't make it real." >From this perspective it becomes real when enough agreement is established. Depends on what you mean by "make it real." The principle of agreement is a classic definition of what we can believe is "true." Something that's true is, in theory, open to verification by anybody who takes the trouble to look far enough into it. (That may involve taking ten years of physics courses, etc., etc., so admittedly it isn't very practical.) What we can reasonably believe to be true, however, is not *necessarily* objectively true. Remember, you could be a brain in a vat in the thirty-ninth century. How would you know? If it's a statistical fluke, it's still a statistical fluke, regardless of the odds. The only way to determine whether it really is a fluke is to recheck the experiment. Against such long odds, they'll be rechecking for a long time, as well as rechecking the odds that their estimate of the odds is correct. My prophecy: If the finding is substantiated, certain parties will announce, "Darwin is next!" |
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Subject: RE: BS: Your Brain, Your Brain on God From: Bill D Date: 25 Sep 11 - 11:09 AM "Neutrinos 'clear the way' for photons thru the 'dark matter' of the Universe, thus they MUST travel a tiny bit faster than the photons." There you go... one new 'datum'! I eagerly await agreement and my certificate of 'reality'. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Your Brain, Your Brain on God From: Amos Date: 25 Sep 11 - 10:57 AM On the subject of relative "realness", here's an amusing tidbit from Science News relating to the recent report of neutrinos at FTL speeds: "An experiment that creates particles called neutrinos has called into question Einstein's theory of special reality. Even though few believe that these results will ultimately hold up, their implications have stirred up quite a fuss. After painstakingly checking and rechecking their data, physicists working on Italy's OPERA experiment say they have clocked neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light. According their calculations, there's only a one in a billion chance that what they're seeing is a statistical fluke. But that doesn't make it real. "... From this perspective it becomes real when enough agreement is established. This is a tempting definition. A |
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Subject: RE: BS: Your Brain, Your Brain on God From: Amos Date: 24 Sep 11 - 10:54 PM A datum is not always a fact. People compute about life all the time on speculative notions, wishful thoughts and postulates, assertions of purpose--all data on which they compute but which may not be factual. Concluding that "men are all rotten" may be a perfectly fine datum to some women, but not to others. Vice versa, too. "Last night I dreamed of Marienbad" is a datum in the mind of the dreamer. It has no correspondent substance in the material universe, but it sure fits into her calculations about life. A |
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Subject: RE: BS: Your Brain, Your Brain on God From: Mrrzy Date: 24 Sep 11 - 07:36 PM Amos, I know you're being silly, but people can take you seriously. Just because nobody in the world is thinking of something at a given time doesn't mean that something suddenly ceases to exist for that given time, nor that it then suddenly blinks back into existence if someone across the world remembers it. Just because everybody in the world believes something doesn't make that true, either. But if it is demonstrable, then they are silly not to, IMH. Reality *is* what we're talking about, right? |
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Subject: RE: BS: Your Brain, Your Brain on God From: Bill D Date: 24 Sep 11 - 07:30 PM Ahhh.. now we see.. datum IS the abstract concept. Which, as noted, leads to a fairly obvious 'truth' when defined that way....in fact, 'data', which I carelessly call 'facts'- are most numerous 'entities' in the Universe. "On a planet going round a star, 327 million light years away, there is a small piece of rock which is 27.39 cm. from a slightly larger rock." Well, probably, anyway. We don't need to go that far. Every relationship of every atom here on Earth to every other atom is, I suppose, a 'datum' if someone contemplates it. What being an ...ahem.. advanced life-form is all about is defining and relating to the relevant data, and then composing conceptual statements ABOUT those relationships, thus creating new data....in an endless spiral. Now THAT is what the idea of ∞ is good for! So...I am willing to concede that definition of a 'datum' as something that doesn't 'exist' without a mind holding it. The 'relationship' of one atom in the Universe to another is still there, whether it is 'conceptualized' or not. Perhaps you'd wish 'datum' to indicate something conceptually different from 'fact'...*shrug*. Once we have defined these things... then what? (All these things AS data, mean job security for philosophers...and THAT makes it all relevant!) |
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Subject: RE: BS: Your Brain, Your Brain on God From: Ed T Date: 24 Sep 11 - 05:01 PM Much bettwe Amos {pssibly the bird is the word. That one always confuses me. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Your Brain, Your Brain on God From: Amos Date: 24 Sep 11 - 04:52 PM It is as obvious as hell to me, Lighter, but it seems someone upthread was quite sure a datam was its own substance, strange as that may sound. Ed, let me rephrase: the datum is a generated facsimile of some aspect of some universe. For the datum to exist it must be generated and perceived. OF course it is also possible for an individual to hold data in his mind he has generated and is no longer wiling to perceive, but that's another can o'worms altogether. A |
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Subject: RE: BS: Your Brain, Your Brain on God From: Ed T Date: 24 Sep 11 - 04:15 PM ""Neither of those data would exist without someone thinking it."" Maybe yes, maybe no? It may depend on who/what is defined as someone and where/when it applies? Where broad statements like these are put forward to serve as "a rule", careful consideration is needed on defining boundaries. It is indeed true that ""the word is the bird"" :) |
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Subject: RE: BS: Your Brain, Your Brain on God From: Lighter Date: 24 Sep 11 - 04:13 PM > I did not say reality=data. A datum is abstracted from a reality that happened. "Pi=3.xxx" is a datum; "Gloria hates men who smoke" is also a datum. Neither of those data would exist without someone thinking it. But then aren't you just saying that a thought can't exist without a mind to think it? That seems obvious. I'm not sure where it leads to. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Your Brain, Your Brain on God From: Lighter Date: 24 Sep 11 - 03:58 PM > Corollary to your theory: "Examining one's own opinion could lead to examining OTHER'S opinions, which can easily be counter-productive." But, interestingly enough, examining OTHERS' opinions doesn't usually lead to examining one's own. At least not automatically. Dormant brains can be revived, but usually they don't want to be. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Your Brain, Your Brain on God From: Amos Date: 24 Sep 11 - 03:47 PM I did not say reality=data. A datum is abstracted from a reality that happened. "Pi=3.xxx" is a datum; "Gloria hates men who smoke" is also a datum. Neither of those data would exist without someone thinking it. Maps are not territory and data is not the substance it relates to. A |
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Subject: RE: BS: Your Brain, Your Brain on God From: Bill D Date: 24 Sep 11 - 01:43 PM "Theory: The universal human tendency is never to examine one's own opinion. " Probably pretty close... after all, we are only 35,000 or so years beyond a primate who NEEDED to believe just what he saw... and then began to invent stories to explain what he couldn't directly observe. The moon & stars & fire and death were mysteries...so we 'explained' them to each other. Some stories were more interesting and were embroidered more elaborately, until there was built-in value in being the one(s) who interpreted the stories. Corollary to your theory: "Examining one's own opinion could lead to examining OTHER'S opinions, which can easily be counter-productive." ------------------------------------------- " Naturally we never got into the heavy-duty Wittgenstein-Heidegger-Husserl stuff. Lucky for me." Me too... as a grad student, I 'taught' only a few sections of phil. 101 for 2 years. I about beat my head on the wall trying to get a simple bit of CS Peirce across. Most of the freshmen were just filling a core curriculum requirement. They were NOT interested in challenging their basic beliefs. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Your Brain, Your Brain on God From: Ed T Date: 24 Sep 11 - 08:55 AM Lighter -In developing a "universal" statement that has a hope of "holding up in time" we should not rule out the possibility that non-functioning brains may be revived, and possibly repaired in some future time. As to related "quality of life" issues, that is another discussion. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Your Brain, Your Brain on God From: Lighter Date: 24 Sep 11 - 08:53 AM Bill, I spent more than 10 years teaching college freshmen "critical thinking" in the context of a general liberal arts program. Naturally we never got into the heavy-duty Wittgenstein-Heidegger-Husserl stuff. Lucky for me. However, that experience convinced me that the natural tendency of the human mind is to believe what it wants to believe, until that belief is proved to be false. For example: Jill believes she can fly. She flaps her arms and gets nowhere. Jill realizes her belief was wrong. Jack believes Sarah Palin would make a swell President. No disproof is readily available. So he keeps believing it. A few years back I saw the world's most profound bumper sticker: "Don't Believe Everything You Think." Theory: The universal human tendency is never to examine one's own opinion. "If it weren't true, I wouldn't have thought it." Until adverse, external events prove someone's wrong, they'll keep on believing. I'm not talking about maintaining your opinion after testing and examining it, as best you can, against alternatives. I'm talking about never examining it in the first place. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Your Brain, Your Brain on God From: Ed T Date: 24 Sep 11 - 08:44 AM If a person were to die for a short period of time (let's say in cold water) and clentical evidence that the mind is no longer putting out data (or, at least current receptors cant pick anything up). Then, the persons is somehow revived. There was no data (at least, for a period), but it does not hold that there was no mind? |
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Subject: RE: BS: Your Brain, Your Brain on God From: Lighter Date: 24 Sep 11 - 08:34 AM Actually, Ed, it may hold up better. With no data (if, like Amos, you mean reality), there's certainly no mind, because the mind is a part of reality. With no data (contents of the mind), there's arguably no mind, even if the mind is in a separate reality. That is, I suppose you could have some sort of "outline" of a mind with no contents at all, but that doesn't sound like a "mind." Just a potential mind. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Your Brain, Your Brain on God From: Bill D Date: 23 Sep 11 - 10:52 PM ♫♪When I lost my data, I al-most lost my mind.♫♪ ...with apologies to Pat Boone, Hank Snow, and many others...including Ivory Joe Hunter, the original author of "When I Lost My Baby" |
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Subject: RE: BS: Your Brain, Your Brain on God From: Ed T Date: 23 Sep 11 - 09:44 PM How does the opposite hold up? "No data,no mind? Likely, not so well. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Your Brain, Your Brain on God From: Bill D Date: 23 Sep 11 - 09:37 PM "One could make that case with a little ingenuity, but one could make the opposite case with, perhaps, a little less..." *grin*...and I spent years reading the details of those with lots of ingenuity. Hegel one day, C.S. Peirce the next, then Kant & Hume and Strawson after that...then Wittgenstein & Kierkegaard & Sartré and Husserl and....oh my! Then we got to comparative religion! What *I* cling to is the solace provided by the basic logical principle that: "From false premises, anything follows!". It doesn't DIS-prove any particular idea, but it sort of indicates that IF your conclusions seem to head in strange directions, you might want to re-examine your basic premises. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Your Brain, Your Brain on God From: Lighter Date: 23 Sep 11 - 09:16 PM > No mind, no data. But "data," even as you employ it, is not equivalent to "objective thing." You seem to suggest that before the appearance of relatively sophisticated animal life on earth (choose your favorite species) nothing existed because no mind was there advanced enough to experience it. But perhaps God was there. But perhaps not. Do you mean to say that without a universal mind like God nothing really exists? One could make that case with a little ingenuity, but one could make the opposite case with, perhaps, a little less. Either way, it's beyond final proof. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Your Brain, Your Brain on God From: Amos Date: 23 Sep 11 - 08:43 PM A datum is a mental construct, a facsimile of states of being, or not being, or motion or motionlessness. No mind, no data. Frank, with all affection your argument about what exists and how it is proven to exist is completely circular. A |
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Subject: RE: BS: Your Brain, Your Brain on God From: Ed T Date: 23 Sep 11 - 06:57 PM Let's try that again |
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Subject: RE: BS: Your Brain, Your Brain on God From: Ed T Date: 23 Sep 11 - 06:55 PM Maybe we got it all wrong, it's not your brain, but your gut? what-your-gut-tells-your-brain- |
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Subject: RE: BS: Your Brain, Your Brain on God From: Bill D Date: 23 Sep 11 - 06:30 PM "A replicable unit of information without a viewpoint considering it does not exist." Is this a variation on the "tree falls in the forest" conundrum? What, do you consider to BE the difference between "A replicable unit of information" and some sort of conglomeration of atoms/molecules, organic or 'merely' inorganic? If I read the statement above correctly, you are asserting that a 'viewpoint' somehow creates and/or defines reality. Sort of makes the Descartes "I think not"...'poof'! joke take on a interesting new life..... |
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Subject: RE: BS: Your Brain, Your Brain on God From: Ed T Date: 23 Sep 11 - 06:08 PM You got a point there, Lighter |
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Subject: RE: BS: Your Brain, Your Brain on God From: Lighter Date: 23 Sep 11 - 05:48 PM If you had everything in the world, that would include the world. So you'd have all the room you needed. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Your Brain, Your Brain on God From: Ed T Date: 23 Sep 11 - 05:39 PM ""In general and over time, the post-apocalyptic crowd with more resources will increase their resources far faster than those with few."" But, if you have everything in the world, where would you put it all? (a quote, I believe, from Steven wright) |
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Subject: RE: BS: Your Brain, Your Brain on God From: Lighter Date: 23 Sep 11 - 05:27 PM By "laws of economics," I don't mean economic theories of redistribution or local adjustments or a quest for "economic justice" or the morality of taxes or "sharing the wealth." It isn't a question of "whose" economics. Its the fundamental mathematics that makes such considerations worth thinking about at all. If we could all multiply loaves and fishes at will, there'd be a lot less hunger and poverty. If we could turn forty bucks into four thousand by investing it at 3% for a year, ditto. But we can't. Mathematics (and other, somewhat less primal reality factors) won't let us. The real world is different. But the math has been built in from the start. Overall, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. If the social system collapses, for whatever reason, the pattern just begins again. In general and over time, the post-apocalyptic crowd with more resources will increase their resources far faster than those with few. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Your Brain, Your Brain on God From: Ed T Date: 23 Sep 11 - 05:01 PM ""No brain, no signals."" Or, at least logically, no signals that can be detected by current technology:) There was a time (and possibly still is) when technologies could not detect many signals we know are present today. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Your Brain, Your Brain on God From: Stringsinger Date: 23 Sep 11 - 04:51 PM The jury is still out because the neutrino speed must be verified but it looks like a promising refutation of Einstein. The laws of "who's" economics is important here. The resultant economic gap between wealth and poverty is due more to a lack of understanding of economics given by various sources. Behaviors of "knowing", "seeing", "perception" are a function of the brain, not anything outside of it, as evidenced by testing, behavioral modification through electronic means, and the inability to concretely observe metaphysical theories through empirical ways. No brain, no signals. The active "nothingness" can't be substantiated as scientifically valid. That's enough for me to say that it doesn't exist. A creator can be posited as a multi-concept, why does it have to be unitary? Probably because it represents the child's need for a father figure, usually a sole powerful person that the child relies on for sustenance and survival. Mother figures don't find their way into contemporary Christianity as a rule with maybe the exception of a Mother Mary who is usually given less status in the Hierarchy. In a different culture where the delegation of authority is spread around in a family unit, pantheon deities spring up such as in Hindu, Shinto, early Greek or Roman. Whether it's a pantheon, a monolithic deity, an earth-bound figure, a ghost or spirit of some sort, none of this has been verifiable through scientific consensus. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Your Brain, Your Brain on God From: Amos Date: 23 Sep 11 - 04:47 PM A replicable unit of information without a viewpoint considering it does not exist. However, some units of information enjoy wider agreement than others. As far as I can see that is the sole difference. Additionally the moment you take a bit of information and try to derive meaning from it --which can only be done by comparison with other units of information--you multiply the subjectivity by several orders of magnitude as the complexity of the array of "units" increases. Omitting the viewpoints engaged in the viewing of the information from your assessment makes the whole thing highly abstract, but it does not make it truer. A |
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Subject: RE: BS: Your Brain, Your Brain on God From: Ed T Date: 23 Sep 11 - 04:33 PM Oops, I meant to say Should one not take a "hermeneutic" approach rather than a "phenomenological" one in consideing and discussing the thread title? |
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Subject: RE: BS: Your Brain, Your Brain on God From: Ed T Date: 23 Sep 11 - 04:31 PM Should one not take a hermeneutic approach rather than a henomenological one in consideing and discussing the thread title? |
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Subject: RE: BS: Your Brain, Your Brain on God From: Ed T Date: 23 Sep 11 - 04:16 PM Just when we think we know it all, and have sound footing? |
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Subject: RE: BS: Your Brain, Your Brain on God From: Mrrzy Date: 23 Sep 11 - 04:03 PM Datum: replicable unit of information. Can be considered independent of the viewer, singular, as before being promoted to datum from finding, it has to be replicated, making the singular viewer moot. And even to be a finding it has to be found, rather than hypothesized or desired. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Your Brain, Your Brain on God From: Amos Date: 23 Sep 11 - 03:48 PM I suppose you have a workable definition for a datum that is independent of the viewer of same? Nahhhh..... |
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Subject: RE: BS: Your Brain, Your Brain on God From: Amos Date: 23 Sep 11 - 03:46 PM Dead man comes back at wife's request. Flatlined with no response, but she got through to him. Go figger. A |
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Subject: RE: BS: Your Brain, Your Brain on God From: Mrrzy Date: 21 Sep 11 - 01:45 PM Um, Stephen Hawking had a pretty good shot at that in whatever that little book was called where he explains why there is something at the non-quantum level rather than nothing. And "if it's not molecules, what is it" is not the $64K question, as there appears to be no reason to posit anything but molecules in the first place. The question would instead be What in the data makes you wonder if there is anything other than molecules. Key phrase being "in the data" as usual. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Your Brain, Your Brain on God From: Bill D Date: 20 Sep 11 - 04:36 PM "How would you act if you were acting as though you didn't have free will? " It's not really how you would act, but how you would justify & defend certain actions. "The devil made me do it." is a not uncommon defense in courts. David Hume said he could sort of 'prove' his ideas of solipisim, but in a footnote he confessed that he acted everyday as if 'others' were really there. Hume said it was often a problem reconciling what felt real and what his logic told him. (The "why is there something rather than nothing" line is directly from Heidegger, who called it the basic, fundamental philosophic question. When you really contemplate it, it does 'seem' like a prior concept.....since we usually imagine all things we have experience of as 'being made' somehow, the idea of 'before matter' leads to 'why & what & when' matter began..........even if we can never answer such questions.) |
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Subject: RE: BS: Your Brain, Your Brain on God From: Lighter Date: 20 Sep 11 - 03:24 PM Just got back from the "Class Warfare" thread, which got me to thinking. The laws of mathematics seem to be "built into" the Big Bang. By that I simply mean they were present and have remained in force. Those laws include the laws of economics - supply and demand, the value of investment, etc. But the laws of economics ultimately result in extreme poverty for most of the world's people and extreme wealth for an (>ack! cough!<) precious few. An omniscient Creator would have known that. What do we make of this? (Remember that the laws of mathematics are not dependent on free will.) |
