techstepgenr8tion
that chatty American
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 Posted: Mon Jun 11, 2012 11:55 am Post subject: |
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| WilliamWDelaney wrote: | | Well, I'm familiar enough with all of these ideas. I simply find a lot of them to be vacuous. For example, you say that you believe our cosmos to be one of many: although I am doubtful anyone will ever really know the real extent of the Cosmos, it seems a bit daft to first vacuously suppose something to be there and then proceed to making all kinds of empty-headed suppositions about its nature. This is what frustrates me often in these kinds of discussions. Ultimately, I realized that I was really the only one taking them seriously. |
| WilliamWDelaney wrote: | | Also, I will have you know that I was always very much a believer in the idea that spiritual meditation could heal the human body, but I realized that I had no idea as to why or how. That was very much the size of it. It was something that, for all practical purposes, seemed to be very effective, but I realized it would be vacuous to suppose about its workings. Well, I somehow ended up doing a lot of investigation on cytokines and immunological questions, while studying the workings and interactions of endogenous opioids, and I realized that highly trained and educated scientists and doctors have been making a fairly unsupported set of assumptions for centuries, which is that the various organ systems in our bodies are largely independent of each other. It turns out that they are wired together a lot more closely than we thought several decades ago. |
| WilliamWDelaney wrote: | | To me, this strongly supports my worldview, which is that the mind is just the output of an organ system. It seems strange to me that some people try to interpret it the other way, trying to say that this somehow negates the idea that the mind is part of a bodily function, and they get pretty enthusiastic with their proclamations. They're like, "Oh, see? The soul is much more important than the body, all of them were created by God, and God sits on a blue throne guarded by four-headed monsters! Praise the lord!" It's really right the other way. What we are really proving, when we find how closely tied-together mind and body actually are, is that they are thoroughly inseparable from each other. One is the device, and the other is the interface. |
I think that once you follow up on what I said after that a few things would clear up. Specifically especially the first thing I quoted and bolded above. The authentication there essentially starts with corroboration of the stories, verifications on whether what they saw when they supposedly left their body were true or false, whether these things were even knowable from where they specifically were spatially (ie. to rule out them overhearing things), and if all of that can be confirmed, it tends to lend credibility that a lot of what they're seeing tells us 'something' valuable or valid about the broader world for a lack of a better term beyond our material universe that we know of.
From that standpoint its not an exercise of imagining things out of whole cloth that don't exist and then trying to define them, rather its essentially a nonempirical activity strictly because the accounts are subjective and sensory rather than being gauged by scientific equipment. In recent decades they've really done as much as they can with a subjective/sensory experience to try and perform at least basic verifications on the validity of these experiences; the reason they still get talked about or that there are still medical researchers very interested is because they're finding things that they simply shouldn't if the mechanism were strictly materialistic. |
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JNathanK
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| Posted: Mon Jun 11, 2012 1:38 pm Post subject: |
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| To me, spirit is anything that relates to consciousness. Even if its strictly related to matter, its still a very bizarre property that makes subjective perception possible. |
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Robdemanc
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| Posted: Mon Jun 11, 2012 2:36 pm Post subject: Re: Do spiritual things exist? |
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| Jitro wrote: | | Do spiritual things exist? How can we say that everything is physical? Is it any more possible to prove that than to prove that all life in the universe originated on Earth? |
The whole notion of "physical" breaks down at the sub atomic level. Everything we see around us (the so-called physical world) is mostly empty space. And the tiny bit that isn't said to be empty space is what we call charged particles that appear to either 1)come in and out of existence at random, or 2)occupy more than one location at a time.
So the physical world is made of nothing but random illusory bits of stuff that don't make sense.
It makes me believe the universe is false and we are brainwashed by electromagnetic energy.
I have no idea what "spiritual" is, but I very much doubt the materialists view is correct when it comes to the big picture (whatever that is). |
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edgewaters
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| Posted: Mon Jun 11, 2012 3:09 pm Post subject: |
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| Jono wrote: | | Aristotle emphasized observation but he didn't emphasize doing experiments to test predictions. As far as doing experiments are concerned, that came long before it was formally part of a scientific method. |
Aristotle's Organon guided experimentation of the era and deals with far more than just observation, even if it does come short of the Baconian method. Mathematics, if you'll recall, wasn't considered a science at this time - it was a philosophy. And the two are still intertwined; think of Bertrand Russell or Rudolf Carnap.
The modern scientific method of course is a direct product of philosophy. So are logics, including deduction. All these things were formalized by philosophy. I am sure astronomer-priests and simple farmers were doing empirical experiments well into prehistory, but they never had a formal understanding of empiricism, formal logic, deduction, or any of that. It was all developed by philosophy, which was the thing that cleaved science and logic from religion and superstition. |
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SpiritBlooms
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| Posted: Mon Jun 11, 2012 5:40 pm Post subject: |
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| JNathanK wrote: | | To me, spirit is anything that relates to consciousness. Even if its strictly related to matter, its still a very bizarre property that makes subjective perception possible. |
Yes, I tend to think of the psyche as being the manifestation of spirit. |
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WilliamWDelaney
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| Posted: Wed Jun 13, 2012 9:13 am Post subject: |
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| ruveyn wrote: | | How can you guys waste so much time on questions that cannot be settled empirically? |
Because it's interesting and has sex appeal. |
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WilliamWDelaney
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| Posted: Wed Jun 13, 2012 10:10 am Post subject: |
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| techstepgenr8tion wrote: | | http://www.btci.org/bioethics/2012/videos2012/vid1.html |
First, I am going to whine here about him concluding his speech by asserting the old "worldly atheist" myth. He was talking about how the belief that our lives are transient is going to make people materialistic, short-sighted, and inclined to live for the moment. This demonstrates to me that he has never actually taken time to truly come to terms with the idea, "I won't always be here."
Nothing puts a fire under your ass to find something other than yourself to live for more than the idea that, someday, you will be gone, and there will be no coming back. If your own existence is all that you live for, you might as well end it. There are a lot of fun and painless ways of doing it, too. Atheists are usually first to the podium to talk about "the future of our planet" or "the destiny of Mankind" because, if they are true humanists, they believe that the human race can do great things, and we ought to keep that dream strong. They're not living for themselves anymore, but they are devoted to trying to do something to play a part in human destiny. Classic sci-fi novels are the parables for our religion. The humanist dream is vast and majestic, enormous in scale. Someday, we could be like shimmering tainlong dancing across an alien sky, making children from another world wonder, "could there be someone out there?" There is actually a lot to be said for someone who truly takes the time to come to grips with the unavoidable reality of human mortality. It ultimately forces you to think outside of yourself, and it's really very exciting, even intoxicating, when you realize that there is a world of dreams and hopes beyond your own existence.
I actually think it's monstrous that religious people are so often determined to cast non-religious thinkers in the light he did. It's ignorant almost to the point of being vulgar. I've said my piece on that.
Now, I sat through his lecture, and I find it very praiseworthy that he is drawing attention here to the idea that we ought to take NDEs seriously and try to investigate them scientifically. However, I think there is a little wishful thinking in his idea that this is proof of "non-local consciousness."
For one thing, he really presented no concrete material for his more extraordinary claims, such as remote viewing or predicting the future. He discussed it, but I didn't seen any numbers on it.
Also, he made a big issue over the fact that anoxia only caused an NDE 13 percent of the time. I see the way he cast this as an inversion of the actual case. The way he cast it, it sounded like he was implying, "only 13 percent of NDEs are associated with anoxia," when the inverse is clearly the case. However, if his study did not find any such experiences that were not associated with anoxia, that means that 100 percent of his NDE cases suffered anoxia. You can make accurate numbers say just about anything you want to, at the end of the day.
Furthermore, there is a very strong association of elevated limbic CO2 levels with NDEs.
http://phys.org/news189887148.html
Also, I think that there is something more subtle behind the fact that we react to reports of NDE being euphoric with such surprise. The fact of the matter is that we are taught to link pain and death together in our heads, and we are taught to link sickness and death together in our heads. It's hard to release this idea that death must be unpleasant. We come to see death as being "kind of like pain, only more than you ever imagined, and it doesn't ever stop." Uhhh, it's not actually like that. The fact of the matter is that you can give yourself a high by cutting off the flow of oxygen to your brain, and there are actually many women who have a bizarre fetish for strangulation. If you are worried about death being terribly painful, it isn't. It's actually kind of trippy. The problem is that you can only do it once, and then you aren't usually around to remember it. I would find something else to do for a while, so you can sort of "save the best for last." Find something nice to do like saving the whales or something.
And another thing that I disagree with is this:
He says that trying to restrict our investigation of these phenomena to scientific investigation is too narrow-minded and restrictive. I can turn that around. A lot of people who believe in the "supernatural" are actually very closed-minded to any other possible explanation for their experience. It's truly a lot more closed-minded to assume that mystical forces must be behind things.
I'll get to the others in a few days.
Last edited by WilliamWDelaney on Wed Jun 13, 2012 10:17 am; edited 1 time in total |
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ruveyn
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| Posted: Wed Jun 13, 2012 10:17 am Post subject: |
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There is not one speck of empirical evidence that spiritual things exist.
All the empirical evidence supports the proposition that all of existence is physical.
No gods, no ghosts, no spirits, no souls, no spooks. Just matter and energy in time and space. That is all there is.
ruveyn |
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WilliamWDelaney
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| Posted: Wed Jun 13, 2012 10:19 am Post subject: |
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| ruveyn wrote: | There is not one speck of empirical evidence that spiritual things exist.
All the empirical evidence supports the proposition that all of existence is physical.
No gods, no ghosts, no spirits, no souls, no spooks. Just matter and energy in time and space. That is all there is. |
I agree, but I am interested in understanding better why some people do believe in these sorts of things. |
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ruveyn
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| Posted: Wed Jun 13, 2012 10:22 am Post subject: |
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| WilliamWDelaney wrote: | | ruveyn wrote: | There is not one speck of empirical evidence that spiritual things exist.
All the empirical evidence supports the proposition that all of existence is physical.
No gods, no ghosts, no spirits, no souls, no spooks. Just matter and energy in time and space. That is all there is. |
I agree, but I am interested in understanding better why some people do believe in these sorts of things. |
Easy. They are afraid of death and dying. Once a person is reconciled to his non-existence in death he no longer needs "spiritual" crutches.
ruveyn |
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SpiritBlooms
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| Posted: Wed Jun 13, 2012 11:40 am Post subject: |
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| ruveyn wrote: | There is not one speck of empirical evidence that spiritual things exist.
All the empirical evidence supports the proposition that all of existence is physical.
No gods, no ghosts, no spirits, no souls, no spooks. Just matter and energy in time and space. That is all there is.
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Why do you argue so emphatically and with such absolute statements if you're not interested and think the argument is a waste of time? |
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techstepgenr8tion
that chatty American
Joined: Feb 07, 2005
Posts: 14830
Location: A beautiful vector among many
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| Posted: Wed Jun 13, 2012 11:48 am Post subject: |
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| WilliamWDelaney wrote: | | techstepgenr8tion wrote: | | http://www.btci.org/bioethics/2012/videos2012/vid1.html |
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I think if you'd rather spare the agony of long videos and want the crux of the argument before going on check out that 15 minute Greyson before United Nations video. I think that does an excellent job of really pointing out what's causing doctors to believe that there's more than hallucination, oxygen issues, etc.. Part of it is the verifiability of things and events seen out of body, the other part - there are 'shared death experiences' had by people neither near death, lacking oxygen, nor do they have any imminent sense that they're lives are in danger. |
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WilliamWDelaney
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| Posted: Wed Jun 13, 2012 12:42 pm Post subject: |
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| SpiritBlooms wrote: | | ruveyn wrote: | There is not one speck of empirical evidence that spiritual things exist.
All the empirical evidence supports the proposition that all of existence is physical.
No gods, no ghosts, no spirits, no souls, no spooks. Just matter and energy in time and space. That is all there is.
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Why do you argue so emphatically and with such absolute statements if you're not interested and think the argument is a waste of time? |
He's very high on himself about how calculating and logical he is, and he likes to preach about it. He is thoroughly convinced that he hasn't had a single irrational thought in years, even though he delusionally clings to a small set of childishly simple-minded and nakedly obtuse ideas. He never actually defends any position, but he just states it and pretends that you must surely see it his way now, and he really believes that he is here enlightening the rest of us heathens. If I could be that dense, I wouldn't have any problems, man. |
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ooOoOoOAnaOoOoOoo
Rasta is about freedom and the living God
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| Posted: Wed Jun 13, 2012 12:49 pm Post subject: Re: Do spiritual things exist? |
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| Jitro wrote: | | Do spiritual things exist? How can we say that everything is physical? Is it any more possible to prove that than to prove that all life in the universe originated on Earth? |
It's all a matter of perception. Perhaps everything exists but we cannot fathom it because we are limited by our senses. People still have little knowledge of what they are really surrounded by. How do you make something sensory free and is there really a point in it? Without senses, there is not a way to interpret anything. Perhaps the answer will come when we render ourselves sensory free. Or not. Sensory deprivation has been tried with non inspiring results. Perhaps spirituality is within the confines of the mind, only? |
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WilliamWDelaney
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| Posted: Wed Jun 13, 2012 1:08 pm Post subject: |
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| techstepgenr8tion wrote: | | WilliamWDelaney wrote: | | techstepgenr8tion wrote: | | http://www.btci.org/bioethics/2012/videos2012/vid1.html |
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I think if you'd rather spare the agony of long videos and want the crux of the argument before going on check out that 15 minute Greyson before United Nations video. I think that does an excellent job of really pointing out what's causing doctors to believe that there's more than hallucination, oxygen issues, etc.. Part of it is the verifiability of things and events seen out of body, the other part - there are 'shared death experiences' had by people neither near death, lacking oxygen, nor do they have any imminent sense that they're lives are in danger. |
Actually, I rather enjoyed the lecture. Pim van Lommel is a charming and personable lecturer. However, I have never encountered an academic who would want to talk to someone who reacted to his ideas with disinterested agreement. It represents a lack of engagement and a dearth of any true interest in the subject matter, which an academic, particularly one of the sort who makes a point of espousing contrarian or unorthodox views, is most interested in accomplishing.
I disagree with his conclusions, but I think it's very heroic of Dr. Lommel to try to bring NDEs into the scope of valid scientific investigation. For far too long, NDEs have been the domain of kooks, witch doctors and toothless fakirs. If we are going to be true to science, reported NDEs ought to be taken seriously.
However, I find that the result of doing so is not generally going to be to the liking of people who are wedded to a specific set of religious views. |
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