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ngill09
Guest
The answer is neuroscience.
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Aloysium
Guest
the answer to “how our physical being participates as part of the physical world”
in neuroscience you will not find a reason for living
good luck (cause i guess that’s all that you’ll have) when life deals what it always does, losing what you love (but I forget that’s just dopamine, seratonin and endorphins)
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ngill09
Guest
I’ll never understand why some people think that the important things in life become meaningless when based on something verifiably real. I find a reason for living in joy, in wonder, in those I love. None of these things are made less significant by being understandable. If I lost everything that gave me reason for living - if I lost everyone I cared about, if I lost hope in humanity, if I lost the capacity for joy or happiness, and it was impossible that any of these things could be replaced, then indeed I would have no reason to live. Unless, of course, I found a new reason. Perhaps preventing such tragedy from befalling others.
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edwest2
Guest
So we’re just walking bags of chemicals responding to outside stimuli? How are we different from flatworms? Even bacteria can carry out all the life processes they require.
Peace,
Ed
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nmgauss
Guest
It appears that many mammalian predators have developed a highly skilled brain to be able to locate, hunt, and capture prey and that this has stimulated the ability to develop strategies and tactics. The omnivorous bear has developed all kinds of strategies to get food, both animal and vegetable. Boredom is a problem among dogs and people, both skilled at developing strategies for survival. If we are bored, life can be unpleasant.
Contrast this with the lifestyle of farm animals. I am not aware of boredom being a problem with domestic cattle, sheep, horses, pigs, etc.
I doubt that flatworms and bacteria get bored. Their individual ability to survive is poor, but their species has managed through very high rates of reproduction.
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prodigalson2011
Guest
This is not what any Christian with any proper understanding of science believes. It has nothing to do with the scientific explanation of material reality, but rather the philosophical implications of a universe without God (which is a universe that science can never necessitate.) The important things become meaningless when they are supposed to have originated in a purposeless process and to end in oblivion. How is anything important if its ultimate outcome is nothingness? How does anything have meaning if both the object which is supposed to hold that meaning and the subject to which it is supposed to mean something are both transient and ultimately inconsequential?
Read the Book of Ecclesiastes. These concepts are not alien to the Judeo-Christian tradition; its just that it has seen through them. The biggest atheist philosophers like Sartre and Russell came to the same conclusion as King Solomon (or whoever actually wrote Ecclesiastes). In the absence of an objective, transcendent and universal meaning, all of these things are vanity. You cannot prevent this tragedy from befalling others: everything–people, their dreams, their joys, their loved ones–are headed towards imminent annihilation and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. The only way to find meaning without God is to willfully delude oneself. All of these pursuits amount to nothing more than delaying the inevitable.
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tonyrey
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rossum
Guest
It is more than a semantic claim. In order for the being to become a creator it has to change from creator-to-be to creator. I note that you capitalise “Being”. This is a dead giveaway that you are reifying being into something it is not.
The being has to change in order to move from non-creator to creator. If it has changed then there must be a difference between before and after. Hence the before and after are not the same being, but different beings. When you were born you could not type on a computer. Now you can. You are different – you have changed.
Buddhism denies a soul, that is it denies any “Being” lurking behind things. We think it is there, but we are mistaken. It has as much substance as the water we see in a mirage. What we think of as a “Being” is actually a series of different beings, each one causally related to its predecessors.
Hence, my approach to “creator” is correct in Buddhist philosophy. Much Western philosophy tends to see the world as fundamentally static with a veneer of change overlaid. Buddhism reverses that. The world is fundamentally changing with a veneer of apparent stasis overlaid. The stasis is an illusion; everything changes.
In the Buddhist analysis, there is no Substance, but only Accident. Substance is merely an artefact of our mental models and has no real existence. Jorge Luis Borges expresses it well:
Not only was it difficult for him to comprehend that the generic symbol dog embraces so many unlike individuals of diverse size and form; it bothered him that the dog at three fourteen (seen from the side) should have the same name as the dog at three fifteen (seen from the front).
– Funes the Memorious
Since the only characteristics of an entity are Accidental characteristics, then a change in Accidental characteristics is a change in the entity.
To elaborate the argument, I am sure you will agree that Accidental and Substantial characteristics are different. Accidental characteristics can change, while Substantial characteristics cannot (transubstantiation apart). Hence we can analyse any entity into Substance and Accident, which differ in their properties. Since a single entity cannot have opposed characteristics, it cannot be both changeable and unchangeable at the same time, then we do not have one entity but two separate entities. Now we can proceed to separately analyse the two entities.
A creator who has created nothing is not a creator. Am I the author of the Great American Novel? Yes, of course I am, I’ll start writing it whenever I get round to it. You can pay me my speaking fee now.
There is no “ontological being”, it is an illusion we create in our minds.
The emptiness of emptiness is the fact that not even emptiness exists ultimately, that it is also dependent, conventional, nominal, and in the end it is just the everydayness of the everyday. Penetrating to the depths of being, we find ourselves back on the surface of things and so discover that there is nothing, after all, beneath those deceptive surfaces. Moreover, what is deceptive about them is simply the fact that we assume ontological depth lurking just beneath.
– Jay Garfield, “Empty words, Buddhist philosophy and cross-cultural interpretation.” OUP 2002.
This is one of those cases where our internal models of reality do not correspond to reality. We use ontological being in our models, like “dog”. In reality there is no “dog”, but just a number of different entities which we place in a classification which we have constructed internally for our own convenience. There is no “dog” out there; it is purely a construct of our mind.
rossum
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rossum
Guest
I observe the birds can make use of gravity to feed themselves. Can birds reason?
My eyes. I can see the computer in front of me.
Which of the two definitions of “universe” are we discussing? Context is very important. In the context of base ten, we have 1 + 1 = 2. In the context of base two we have 1 + 1 = 10. The correct answer depends on the context.
rossum
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ngill09
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Still amazed at how much your bias clouds your vision.
Difference between flatworms and humans - consciousness, sapience, sentience. Whether the result of biology or magic, the simple fact of those qualities makes us important to eachother.
The bolded is simply untrue, and I don’t even believe that you really believe it. Yes, nothing I do will mean anything in a billion years. But nothing that will happen in a billion years makes any difference now, so why do you care so much about the extremely distant future? What matters now, matters now.
Ecclesiastes is my favorite book in the Bible. Finding meaning in God is willfully deluding yourself. That is what it means to have faith. Coming to terms with your mortality is hardly self-delusion. You’re asserting that being temporary means being unimportant. That is simply not true. I can set my purpose to raise a child to the best of my ability - to impart wisdom and joy and the hope for a life brimming with experience. Yes, he will die… but he will also live, and that’s all that matters.
Oh you’re right. If human thoughts and conclusions were caused by neural events, then they wouldn’t be infallible! I forgot that humans were never wrong.
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DrTaffy
Guest
For those interested, this week’s New Scientist (no 2917, 18th May 2013) has a special feature on consciousness.
TonyRey might want to dose up on beta blockers before reading it, but it is an interesting and very accessible discussion of various modern views on the subject.
TonyRey might want to dose up on beta blockers before reading it, but it is an interesting and very accessible discussion of various modern views on the subject.
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prodigalson2011
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Where did I say anything about the distant future? Quantity of time makes no difference. Meaning is a transcendent property. It either is or it isn’t, and it can never move from meaning to non-meaning. If something loses meaning, it never really had meaning to begin with. It had the illusion of meaning. The cold hard truth of materialism, as virtually all the greatest materialist thinkers have conceded, is that life is essentially meaningless. Of course we can create our own goals, life narratives and emotional investments, but that doesn’t grant these things any objective meaning.
Your definition of faith is wanting; faith is trust in a person, in the same way a child has faith in her parents, a friend in a friend, a husband in a wife. Faith is ultimately a relationship.
More to the point, there are numerous logically coherent arguments for God’s existence. I do not believe simply because I wish it were true. I was an atheist for most of my life and I still have a very strongly skeptical nature. Arguments from philosophy, historical evidence and scientific research into different Christological phenomena (i.e., miracles, apparitions, the Shroud, biblical astronomy and archaeology, etc) all played a part in my conversion.
On the other hand, there are exactly zero coherent arguments for the reality of meaning in a materialistic universe.
Also, I must admit I find it a bit amusing that you would claim Ecclesiastes as your favorite Biblical book when its entire point is to illustrate the absurdity of the exact argument you’re making right now.
Coming to terms with one’s mortality is not the same as asserting that one’s life has meaning. Sartre came to terms with his mortality, but those terms were consistent with the objective ramifications of his worldview.
Provide a logical argument for the importance of a life in a universe that is destined for annihilation. Not an emotional argument, which is what this amounts to, but a reasonable one. Feelings are not truth.
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ngill09
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The sort of “objective meaning” you’re looking for doesn’t exist, and wouldn’t exist even if there was a supernatural element to us. Essentially all you’re doing is propping up your subjective purpose (pleasing God, worshipping God, etc.) and calling it objective.
Believe it or not, your definition of faith is not the most popular one used by Christians. Most Christians, at least in my experience, hold that faith is persisting in belief despite a lack of evidence.
To be subjective is not to be unreal. Pain and happiness are both subjective, and yet I think you would not find those things any less real. In fact, one could argue that they are more real and important than most things held to be “objective”.
Reread Ecclesiastes and Sartre. Both are widely misunderstood. I like Ecclesiastes because it deals with existentialism, and it makes good points about what’s important in life. But it misses something very important.
Again, I’m not looking for an “objective purpose” imposed by the universe. Existence precedes essence, whether or not a God exists.
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Peter_Plato
Guest
Yes but this change is only one of realizing the potential that was already present in me when I was conceived - the potential to have fingers and use them. In this sense I haven’t changed at all. I have just fully become what I always was. If I was conceived as an eel, I could never type on a computer because the potency to do so would not have been present from the beginning. As you say below, substantially, as an eel, I was never a typist and never could be. Conceived as a human with fingers, I always was a typist potentially and at some point realized the potential that was always (at least from conception) there.
This is an interesting point in light of the fact that Thomist philosophy views God as eternal pure act. In this sense, the universe is much like the Great American Novel complete with its own time signature. Imagine that the Great American Novel exists in eternity. God has, in an eternal sense, actualized it, but did so in non-time, which is what eternity is.To elaborate the argument, I am sure you will agree that Accidental and Substantial characteristics are different. Accidental characteristics can change, while Substantial characteristics cannot (transubstantiation apart). Hence we can analyse any entity into Substance and Accident, which differ in their properties. Since a single entity cannot have opposed characteristics, it cannot be both changeable and unchangeable at the same time, then we do not have one entity but two separate entities. Now we can proceed to separately analyse the two entities.
A creator who has created nothing is not a creator. Am I the author of the Great American Novel? Yes, of course I am, I’ll start writing it whenever I get round to it. You can pay me my speaking fee now.
The fact that the Great American Novel (the universe) has its own time signature (beginning) fools us into thinking that the universe’s beginning must correlate to the instant that God brought it into being. However, this is not the case because the action of the Author beginning to write the Great American Novel is not at all related to the beginning of the story contained in the Great American Novel. The author’s act of writing is not the same as the action written about in Chapter 1 on page 1.
In fact, the Great American Novel could exist eternally but still have Chapter 1, page 1 as its own beginning sequence. The reality contained inside the story of the Great American Novel is a completely separate reality and time sequence from the Author’s Reality.
In this sense, the universe could have a beginning contained within it (Big Bang sequence), but also exist eternally as an encapsulated whole (the entire storyline of the universe) since the two time sequences - the sequence in the universe and the sequence external to it - need not be connected chronologically. In fact the sequence outside the universe could be, but need not be, timeless.
Perhaps the universe time-space capsule exists within another time-space capsule (heavenly realm). Even so, this ulterior time-space capsule need not contain God either. God may be, and likely is, completely outside of the constraints of time, but any creation of God could require some form of time schema to be actualized. Time could simply be an aspect of any created reality vis a vis God, but need not be an aspect of God himself, as any novel has its own time sequence independent of the realm within which the author actually abides.
Yes, and our minds might be an illusion we create in our minds. So we might equally add, “There is no mind. Mind is simply the illusion we create in our mind.” I guess at some point we have to commit to one illusion or other or trust that perhaps the illusory sense we have about the illusion is the actual illusion and since the illusion is the illusion, things are simply real or “ontological” after all.
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Peter_Plato
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That is your perception of what people mean by faith. I doubt you have done any actual data gathering on the question.
Furthermore, this belies an inadequate view of human existence. Humans must make choices about the future. Those choices are about ends seen to be good or willed to come about. Evidence provides nothing in terms of qualitative data. Evidence tells us what has happened and what could happen, but says nothing about what should happen. In this sense, evidence is useless and one’s world view comes into play. An atheist persists in a belief and has faith in this belief despite a lack of evidence because, once again, choices we make in terms of what we think we should do (moral choices, for example) are not evidential in nature but are faith based - atheism is just as much a faith where ethics or choices are concerned.
Heroism is a great example of where faith or hope are superior to an evidential mindset. In the heat of battle, where all seems lost, the heroes are often the ones who persist in believing in a good resolution to the situation when all evidence points to the contrary. In cases such as these persistence is a virtue, except to our skewed scientific minded modern view that overlooks the fact that quality cannot be quantified and what has been need not determine what will be.
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grannymh
Guest
Now I know that you are almost as old as I am. You referred to the “Great American Novel!”It is more than a semantic claim. In order for the being to become a creator it has to change from creator-to-be to creator. I note that you capitalise “Being”. This is a dead giveaway that you are reifying being into something it is not.
The being has to change in order to move from non-creator to creator. If it has changed then there must be a difference between before and after. Hence the before and after are not the same being, but different beings. When you were born you could not type on a computer. Now you can. You are different – you have changed.
Buddhism denies a soul, that is it denies any “Being” lurking behind things. We think it is there, but we are mistaken. It has as much substance as the water we see in a mirage. What we think of as a “Being” is actually a series of different beings, each one causally related to its predecessors.
Hence, my approach to “creator” is correct in Buddhist philosophy. Much Western philosophy tends to see the world as fundamentally static with a veneer of change overlaid. Buddhism reverses that. The world is fundamentally changing with a veneer of apparent stasis overlaid. The stasis is an illusion; everything changes.
In the Buddhist analysis, there is no Substance, but only Accident. Substance is merely an artefact of our mental models and has no real existence. Jorge Luis Borges expresses it well:
Not only was it difficult for him to comprehend that the generic symbol dog embraces so many unlike individuals of diverse size and form; it bothered him that the dog at three fourteen (seen from the side) should have the same name as the dog at three fifteen (seen from the front).
– Funes the Memorious
Since the only characteristics of an entity are Accidental characteristics, then a change in Accidental characteristics is a change in the entity.
To elaborate the argument, I am sure you will agree that Accidental and Substantial characteristics are different. Accidental characteristics can change, while Substantial characteristics cannot (transubstantiation apart). Hence we can analyse any entity into Substance and Accident, which differ in their properties. Since a single entity cannot have opposed characteristics, it cannot be both changeable and unchangeable at the same time, then we do not have one entity but two separate entities. Now we can proceed to separately analyse the two entities.
A creator who has created nothing is not a creator. Am I the author of the Great American Novel? Yes, of course I am, I’ll start writing it whenever I get round to it. You can pay me my speaking fee now.
There is no “ontological being”, it is an illusion we create in our minds.
The emptiness of emptiness is the fact that not even emptiness exists ultimately, that it is also dependent, conventional, nominal, and in the end it is just the everydayness of the everyday. Penetrating to the depths of being, we find ourselves back on the surface of things and so discover that there is nothing, after all, beneath those deceptive surfaces. Moreover, what is deceptive about them is simply the fact that we assume ontological depth lurking just beneath.
– Jay Garfield, “Empty words, Buddhist philosophy and cross-cultural interpretation.” OUP 2002.
This is one of those cases where our internal models of reality do not correspond to reality. We use ontological being in our models, like “dog”. In reality there is no “dog”, but just a number of different entities which we place in a classification which we have constructed internally for our own convenience. There is no “dog” out there; it is purely a construct of our mind.
rossum
Thank you friend, for a clear description of part of your worldview. A part which I did not know. I have studied the essence of human nature since I landed on CAF; yet, I have so little knowledge. My personal proof for the existence of God was so irrational (it worked) that I will probably never approach the concept of an “ontological being”. Still, some very small parts of my metaphysics course remain in my memory bank.
I doubt that I would agree that Accidental and Substantial characteristics are different without qualifications.
They certainly would be different on a course exam and in the Ivory Tower. However, in real life experience, I see them as an unique unification of one single nature. I am influenced by the oneness of body and soul which is the human person ever since I was nailed on CAF for my Cartesian [extreme] dualism.
Bottom line is that I need to compare, on my own, your worldview with mine.
In the meantime, here is your speaking fee regarding the “Great American Novel” which you are sending to the publisher tomorrow.:twocents:
The rest will be in the post.
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rossum
Guest
Then we have two entities, yourself and the potential. The potential has obviously changed, from unrealized to realized. If you claim not to have changed then we certainly have two different entities. A chessboard cannot be a single thing; it must be a compound of its black part and its white part.
If you try to break anything down into a changing part and an unchanging part, then I will perform the same analysis and end up with two different entities.
God acts inside of time. Hence, inside time, God must change since change is difference within time.
Then we need to analyse change into change-1, in the normal universe, and change-2 in the enclosing space-time capsule.
Whenever you try to give the same entity opposed properties, I will analyse that entity into two separate entities, hence resolving the contradiction.
I have no problem with things being real. The issue comes when people reify the real to the Real (complete with initial capital). The real is just the everyday world that we function in. The Real is a mental construct that has no existence in the external world.
You can show me a dog, and I will accept that. You cannot show me Dog – the substance of Dog. Our idea of Dog is just a convenient internal classification device; it has no external reality. External reality contains canine quadrupeds, it does not contain Dog.
rossum
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edwest2
Guest
We’re important to each other? Why?Still amazed at how much your bias clouds your vision.
Difference between flatworms and humans - consciousness, sapience, sentience. Whether the result of biology or magic, the simple fact of those qualities makes us important to eachother.
The bolded is simply untrue, and I don’t even believe that you really believe it. Yes, nothing I do will mean anything in a billion years. But nothing that will happen in a billion years makes any difference now, so why do you care so much about the extremely distant future? What matters now, matters now.
Ecclesiastes is my favorite book in the Bible. Finding meaning in God is willfully deluding yourself. That is what it means to have faith. Coming to terms with your mortality is hardly self-delusion. You’re asserting that being temporary means being unimportant. That is simply not true. I can set my purpose to raise a child to the best of my ability - to impart wisdom and joy and the hope for a life brimming with experience. Yes, he will die… but he will also live, and that’s all that matters.
Oh you’re right. If human thoughts and conclusions were caused by neural events, then they wouldn’t be infallible! I forgot that humans were never wrong.
Peace,
Ed
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ngill09
Guest
Because most people aren’t psychopaths.
Immediately I should note that evidence does not need to be quantitative, so your argument completely falls apart without that false assumption.ngill09:
That is your perception of what people mean by faith. I doubt you have done any actual data gathering on the question.
Furthermore, this belies an inadequate view of human existence. Humans must make choices about the future. Those choices are about ends seen to be good or willed to come about. Evidence provides nothing in terms of qualitative data. Evidence tells us what has happened and what could happen, but says nothing about what should happen. In this sense, evidence is useless and one’s world view comes into play. An atheist persists in a belief and has faith in this belief despite a lack of evidence because, once again, choices we make in terms of what we think we should do (moral choices, for example) are not evidential in nature but are faith based - atheism is just as much a faith where ethics or choices are concerned.
Heroism is a great example of where faith or hope are superior to an evidential mindset. In the heat of battle, where all seems lost, the heroes are often the ones who persist in believing in a good resolution to the situation when all evidence points to the contrary. In cases such as these persistence is a virtue, except to our skewed scientific minded modern view that overlooks the fact that quality cannot be quantified and what has been need not determine what will be.
I’ll also point out that while you derided my “perception” of what faith is, you then proceeded to describe faith in almost the exact same terms I did.
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