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grannymh
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Atheist position, Christian position, my positon. Objective truth does not depend on anyone’s position. My apology.
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GreggAlvarez
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I completely agree. I am all about objectivity. In fact, it is quite burdensome most of the time.
And you have nothing to apologize for. But, apology accepted if that makes you feel better.
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LogisticsBranch
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Hello Gregg, there isn’t any such thing as the ‘godless postion of the purpose of the brain’. If you want to learn about the mind then read the links I’ve provided.
The beauty of science is that it doesn’t matter if a person is religious or non-religious. Science isn’t biased. Bye the way, STEPHEN W. HAWKING is one of my very favorite scientists in the world and an academician on The Pontifical Academy of Sciences.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_academies/acdscien/own/documents/hawkingnew.html
I mentioned before in another message to this topic about Nobel-winning neuroscientist Sir John Eccles. He also is academician on The Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
Science helps philosophy and theology to better understand the human being.
Love, honesty and compassion make us unique. This unique human capacity extends our power to do good beyond the family. Close and enduring friendships with religious and non-religious (atheists) which make us important to others, naturally enhance our sense of significance. True friends value and accept us as we really are and allow us to return this grace. Contributions of love and support in a friend’s life, enhance our sense of personal significance as well, and bring deeper meaning to our lives so thinkth me.
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GreggAlvarez
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You are under the false illusion that we are in disagreement.Hello Gregg, there isn’t any such thing as the ‘godless postion of the purpose of the brain’. If you want to learn about the mind then read the links I’ve provided.
vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_academies/acdscien/own/documents/hawkingnew.html
I mentioned before in another message to this topic about Nobel-winning neuroscientist Sir John Eccles. He also is academician on The Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
Science helps philosophy and theology to better understand the human being.
I agree with every single bit of this… Even your first sentence. I never said any such thing exists. (I would not be a Christian if I thought the opposite.) Problem is that a lot try to invoke the reality that there is no God and try to work with that. I agree that there is no godless position for anything. I am not saying there is. People just THINK there is and work it into their experiments.
Hawking is my favorite scientist also. But, his worst book yet is the Grand Design BECAUSE of the reason I gave. He tried to make it the godless view. (If you disagree, then that is where we disagree.) This is my only point. Most of his other books, you cannot even tell whether or not he believes in God and that is how it should be. I found out when I read “The Grand Design” though. He is still a favorite of mine but he went a little low in my book.
I agree science does not depend on the scientist’s religious or non-religious commitment (for lack of better words). Science itself is not biased but that does not mean scientists cannot be. I STILL have no clue whether Brian Greene believes in God. He is another favorite of mine. That is why he is a favorite though.
I do not want to learn about the mind. I could not care less about the mind. It would all go way over my head anyway. I am not intelligent enough to understand it. I just use it and I am happy with it.
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LogisticsBranch
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Greg, I’m not under ‘false illusion’. You said what you said. Thanks for letting me know that you aren’t intelligent enough to understand your own mind though you seem to use it. However, I’ve gotten an understanding about how you think. Your thoughts belong to your mind. FYI, science doesn’t use God (supernatural) in the natural world where reputable scientists are peer-reviewed, therefore reputable scientists that are religious or non-religious aren’t biased.
Nice to have met you. I’m pleased that you don’t wish to further our discussion regarding the mind.
Maybe this time I will have the honor to have the last say in the matter as I earlier expressed. I’ve provided a lot of scientific information for people to examine in my previous messages. Again I repeat, “Science helps philosophy and theology to better understand the human being. Love, honesty and compassion make us unique. This unique human capacity extends our power to do good beyond the family. Close and enduring friendships with religious and non-religious (atheists) which make us important to others, naturally enhance our sense of significance. True friends value and accept us as we really are and allow us to return this grace. Contributions of love and support in a friend’s life, enhance our sense of personal significance as well, and bring deeper meaning to our lives so thinkth me.”
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inocente
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Interesting link
.The above para made me recall an anecdote from before we moved to Spain. We were in a large church that invited professional guest speakers. One reported on a near-death out-of-body experience where he floated off to heaven, spoke to Jesus, etc. Trouble was it was way too poetic, there was a palpable rolling of eyes in the congregation, and afterward the pastor admitted that a certain amount of skepticism might be called for in discerning true visions, and maybe he should have done that before forking out the fee
.My experience in information technology leads me to think that any “memory” of cardiac arrest is mainly constructed after the event in trying to make sense of what happened. During arrest the brain presumably closes down rapidly, leaving partial, shockingly incomprehensible memories, and then during recovery reconciles them by unconsciously inventing details which the individual has no way of separating from reality. It will be valuable if the Human Consciousness Project can shed light on this process.
Now everyone is welcome to call me too skeptical and materialistic by half, and I know it gets up some peoples’ noses. Computers are a darn sight more simple and unsophisticated than the brain but I genuinely can’t see any reason why consciousness can’t and won’t be explained, although I don’t share the fear of some that this would undermine our faith in any way.
Have you seen the Bra(name removed by moderator)ort? It’s an electronic lollipop that helps the blind see with their tongue. Apparently it only takes a few sessions to learn, and the inference is that the visual parts of the brain “rewire” themselves to use feelings. Amazing stuff (the video on the page is a little off-topic but worth watching).
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inocente
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Scientists get paid to show the mind isn’t spiritual? Yes you’re a bit cranky, you need your morning Pepsi
. I’d love to have access to their whizz-bang technology. The original paper is here, but you need to pay or be a subscriber to Nature. nature.com/nature/journal/v452/n7185/full/nature06713.htmlThe bit that got me is the idea of reconstructing dreams – we enter REM sleep half a dozen times every night, but the long-term memory is switched off during sleep so we can only ever remember waking dreams. Imagine if we could watch all of them on YouTube
.Question for you and other Catholics. I know the Catholic Encyclopedia was published a hundred years ago and doesn’t necessarily reflect the faith, but the article on the Supernatural Order intrigues me. It makes my brain hurt but if I’m reading it right, it says that materialistic explanations of the supernatural are good to go as long as they acknowledge the grace of God in their creation and sustenance. In turn this would allow a naturalistic explanation of mind without getting into trouble. Thoughts?
The Supernatural Order is the ensemble of effects exceeding the powers of the created universe and gratuitously produced by God for the purpose of raising the rational creature above its native sphere to a God-like life and destiny. The meaning of the phrase fluctuates with that of its antithesis, the natural order. Those who conceive the latter as the world of material beings to the exclusion of immaterial entities, or as the necessary mechanism of cause and effect to the exclusion of the free agency of the will, or again as the inherent forces of the universe to the exclusion of the extrinsic concurrence of God, quite consistently call supernatural all spiritual facts or voluntary determinations or Divine operations. There is no objection to that way of speaking provided the assertion of the supernatural so understood be not made, by a fallacious transference of meaning, to screen the negation of the supernatural as defined above. Catholic theologians sometimes call supernatural the miraculous way in which certain effects, in themselves natural, are produced, or certain endowments (like man’s immunity from death, suffering, passion, and ignorance) that bring the lower class up to the higher though always within the limits of the created, but they are careful in qualifying the former as accidentally supernatural (supernaturale per accidens) and the latter as relatively supernatural (prœternaturale).
PS: I started to look at some of the videos in LogisticsBranch’s link (post #30), and purely by chance started with one that may interest you about human origins: Contingent Nature of Reality - Merlin W. Donald. It’s only a hypothesis, but along the way he talks about stuff like cognitive architectures – functional maps that only exist in the brains of the literate, or musicians, etc. Try to get audio granny!
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JDaniel
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But . . . MoM:I have never heard that before.
I have no idea.
But I am going to say that it can happen anyway just to annoy you.
A thing can appear purposeful and yet have no objective purpose. That is to say that there can be the illusion of purpose if events accidentally coincide in such a manner that we can identify aspects of it as corresponding to our idea of purpose, much in the same way that a mirage corresponds to our idea of an oasis.
That’s not what is indicative of ‘purpose’! What is indicative of ‘purpose’ is when an event happens always or for the most part from the same cause or causes so that we cannot attribute that event to chance. When we watch a pair of birds court, gather sticks, then make a nest, we can be pretty sure that the purpose of all of that is for ‘the production of a future generation’. When we watch two people making vocalizations that have a commonality to them, while sipping coffee together at Starbucks, we are right to conclude that the purpose of those sounds is communicative, in some manner - even if we don’t understand their language.
Another approach to proving ‘purpose’ is to show that in any completed series of actions the prior members of the series are for the sake of the later or posterior ones (Commentary on the Physics, Bk. II, les. 13, 3). If we look back at the example of the mating birds, above, then add to it ‘the laying of eggs, the tending of those eggs, the tending of the fledglings, and the eventual pushing of them out to fly’, we get an even stronger sense of the ‘purpose’ of those actions. ‘Purpose’ is usually a clear manifestation of an action or, of a series of actions.
The ‘mirage’ you mention above speaks more to a certain regularity, determination and order, in nature, rather than to disorder, coincidence, or chance. We know a mirage is a kind of illusion every time we encounter one again - after the first one or two. We recognize it as a kind of rare violation of the order we perceive usually in nature. Further proof of purpose in nature.
(I know you knew all this; I just wanted to annoy you!
)God bless,
jd
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JDaniel
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GreggAlvarez
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Again, I agree with everything you said… And yes, I did say what I said. You thought we were in disagreement when we were actually agreement. What you thought I meant was not what I meant though. That is not your fault. It is nobody’s fault. And I am not being hostile if that is what you think… We are in complete agreement here. Maybe except for that last part because they CAN be. I am not saying they are or if they are once, then that defines them as biased. I am just saying that they CAN be.Greg, I’m not under ‘false illusion’. You said what you said. Thanks for letting me know that you aren’t intelligent enough to understand your own mind though you seem to use it. However, I’ve gotten an understanding about how you think. Your thoughts belong to your mind. FYI, science doesn’t use God (supernatural) in the natural world where reputable scientists are peer-reviewed, therefore reputable scientists that are religious or non-religious aren’t biased.
I do not mind using my mind; I mind understanding it because there are way too many big words involved. I use this computer but I could care less how it works. There are people who are interested in those kinds of things. I am not one. I would rather play trumpet and go to Mass. I got a headache today just trying to read philosophy. No need to give myself a headache over why that gave me a headache… Just preference is all.
But, trust me… You have no clue how I think. I do not even have a clue. No hostility here. I just want you to know that we are in agreement. We are just looking at the same coin from different angles.
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lemondiesel
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tonyrey
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what they are doing but they act in order to survive. Highly complex inorganic structures have no such goal. So how and why did the amoeba’s goal-seeking activity originate?
Isn’t survival an unconscious act?
Not as far as we and other rational beings are concerned.
They are different at the same time.Why?
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lemondiesel
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How so? Doesn’t it control our basic instincts?Not as far as we and other rational beings are concerned.
I’ll get back to you when I can properly answer this.Why?
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tonyrey
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We can control them and choose not to survive…
They are different at the same time. *Why?
I don’t envy you in your task.
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lemondiesel
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only if we are rational and reasonable
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davidv
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Our loving God has instills each of these traits within us to be developed and used.
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lemondiesel
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And if one doesn’t develop and use these traits, what do they live by?
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davidv
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Immaturity? Irrationality?
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tonyrey
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Reason alone does not give us the power to control our instincts. We could be helpless spectators…
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inocente
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“brain” and “mind” are different models. “mind” possibly had more value before we knew where it was located, although technically I think it isn’t mind=brain, it’s mind=entire nervous system.Why?
But in Spanish for example, mind=mente, it’s all in the mind=es pura suggestión, open mind=una mentalidad abieta, mind over matter=voluntad. Even if you don’t understand the lingo, you can see different words replacing the loose English “mind”. So “mind” could be a language based abstraction rather than objective.
Either of you fancy having a go answering the question in post #47 (third para)?
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