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soma
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Praise the Lord, Our God , the strongest force and the devil will have no power. Walk with the Lord Our God and you have nothing to fear.
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tonyrey
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The whole of history can be regarded as a collection of anecdotes but do you reject history because - like all knowledge - it is ultimately derived from personal experience?
In that case most evidence in a court of law is not evidence…
Why not all thoughts? It is significant that you leave a loophole!
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antunesaa
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It seems to never occur to people that some things are likely to never be figured out?! I don’t understand the “yet” part, because there is no evidence that our minds are able to grasp everything there is to grasp, or even computers built by us. I think this is the mirror image of the religious fanatics: an irrational belief in something unsupported by historical, scientific or other types of evidence. I am originally an engineer (though eventually became an economist) and have been reading scientific publications for 25 years (I’m 39). One thing that strikes me is the fact that, as soon as something new is discovered or something old is refuted, a lot of new problems immediately arise. So it seems a never ending process: new findings → new questions. Some questions have been around for hundreds of years. Some have been for thousands of years. It takes a lot of faith to believe that they and the new ones will ever be answered by us.
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antunesaa
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Tony, could you be a little more specific about your experience, if you’re ok with that? I would be very interested in that, because the separation of soul and body fascinates me. This has important theological implications. For instance, the Mother Church teaches that if you’re in a state of mortal sin when you die (that is, the moment when the soul leaves the body) then you’ll be condemned; but it could be the case that death is a more complex process and there is some time between the moment the soul leaves the body and the moment it leaves this world, therefore not returning back to it. This opens the way for hope in the salvation of mortal sinners, for they might still have some time to repent. God knows how and if they do… Many people near death have also described that they saw flashbacks of their entire lives. This is also interesting and could be a manifestation of the same phenomenon.
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liquidpele
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Are you always this paranoid?
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liquidpele
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All *your *knowledge is from personal experience… but you’re neglecting community knowledge. If you read a science book, you can then to reproduce the experiments in it and get the same predicted results. That is a powerful thing.The whole of history can be regarded as a collection of anecdotes but do you reject history because - like all knowledge - it is ultimately derived from personal experience?
In that case most evidence in a court of law is not evidence…
Why not all thoughts? It is significant that you leave a loophole!
Actually, the one thing in a court of law that is not solid evidence is witness testimony, and is ironically one of the least accurate and most highly regarded forms.
agora.stanford.edu/sjls/Issue%20One/fisher&tversky.htm
I left the loophole because your own thoughts are representative of the “I think therefore I am” mantra. However, like I said, your thoughts are mostly based on the physical and your past experiences. A great example was a case where a girl was chained to a toilet and never spoken to for 15 years (her parents were psychotic). By the time she was found, he had no knowledge of the world beyond the room she was in and could not speak. Psychologists found that while she was able to pick up certain things, other key parts of the human psyci simply would not develop - she had missed the point in her life where her brain would have developed that. She will be likely taken care of for the rest of her life. Point being, what you consider your thoughts depend on your surroundings and experiences.
The girl is talked about some in this video, about child prodigies and child development:
wimp.com/childsymphonies/
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liquidpele
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You misunderstand. I’m not suggesting that we have or ever will know everything. I’m suggesting we never stop *trying *to learn all we can. To give up it to except ignorance.
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antonabe
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Everything in Christianity cannot be explained by scientific evidence and a great deal of Faith is required.On this basis it will never be acceptable to Athiests or Agnostics.The foundation of Christianity is the New Testament and if people do not accept this as part of History further dialogue with non believers is a wastage of time and effort.They are not here to learn and their motives are questionable.
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antunesaa
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I think many of those who come here are in fact what people call “seekers”. Rationally they are inclined not believe in God, but the fact that sooooooo many people need to believe in God, and also that, in their view, everything is essentially pointless (as purpose cannot originate from the fact that we are just a serendipitous effect of randomness), leaves a deeply uncomfortable feeling of unrest and emptiness. I know this because in my early 20s I slipped into agnosticism. This was the least joyful period of my life - and I am usually a very cheerful person. So, a few years later, consciously, rationally and willingly, I decided to embrace faith again. I never looked back to those times.
Now, usually atheists think people of faith are, at best, deluded. While this might be the case, the truth is that, if they’re right, they too are deluded, because a world which is part random and part deterministic has no place for reason or will. Everything is predetermined or random or both, an endless succession of events which really have no purpose and which, in the end, supposedly rational beings are just blind tools for. We’re, “like the stupid beast, a postponed cadaver that procreates”, to cite Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. This dreadful implication of atheism has led many philosophers either to reject it, or to embrace various desperate moral systems such as nihilism or hedonism. I once heard in the radio a French contemporary philosopher stating exactly this (he happened to be a hedonist of the “good” kind). But he conceded boldly that life was completely pointless, so the best thing we could do was to taste it and savour it the best way we could. This would never be enough for me.
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liquidpele
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While I think that’s a good summary of why most of us don’t believe, never say never. I’ve known several people that went from atheist to a believer and vice versa.
Are you suggesting that communication be abandoned? “Regardless of what weapons might be used to effect silence, words will always retain their power. Words are the means to meaning, and for some, the annunciation of truth”. As for motives possibly being questionable, the same can be said of anyone.
You seem to be under the “Atheists are sent by Satan” flag of “us vs them” mentality. Philosophy is about sharing and discussing ideas, not picking sides, I urge you to accept that atheists are just as human as anyone else. To deny it is to live in fantasy and paranoia.
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ilovekittens
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Near death experience does seem to have a neurological mechanism. For instance,
neurology.org/cgi/content/abstract/66/7/1003
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Moontown_Rabbit
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In response to the original post, my own view is that Aquinas was correct. He described the rational soul as the only eternal part of man’s nature. If it is eternal it must be supernatural. This means that the brain is distinct from our mind, for we know that brains rot into the ground but our minds live on. Aquinas also notes that angels are immaterial and have a mind, another clue that brains are unnecessary for thought. An extreme way of putting this is to say that it would not surprise me if in three hundred years anatomists announce that the sole purpose of the brain is to filter CO2 from the air. A more moderate explanation is to think of the brain as a component of what Aquinas calls the sensitive soul. Humans and animals have a sensitive soul that can detect and respond to sensory information. The third type of soul is nutritive (the ability to eat) and is possessed by plants, animals and humans.
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tonyrey
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All knowledge is from personal experience because the community is composed of individual persons.
Science deals only with a very limited area of personal experience.
If there are enough witnesses their testimony is sufficient to find the accused guilty.
It’s not a mantra but a fact. Try to deny it!
Obviously she cannot communicate about things she has never experienced and her ability to communicate is retarded but that does not mean that her intelligence is subnormal or that she is incapable of love, gratitude and appreciation - the things that really matter. Helen Keller’s knowledge of the physical world was minimal and she knew of it only via symbols but she developed extraordinary insight into reality as a whole (which far exceeds physical reality).
Are** all **your thoughts limited to your surroundings and experiences?
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tonyrey
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All our experiences have neurological mechanisms but that does mean they all originate in the brain. Otherwise we are just biological machines…
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liquidpele
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All knowledge is from personal experience, but not YOUR personal experiences. You don’t know what I know, but you could read about it or something and learn about mine. Community knowledge is the combination of personal experiences. Anyway, I think we agree on that aspect.All knowledge is from personal experience because the community is composed of individual persons.
Science deals only with a very limited area of personal experience.
If there are enough witnesses their testimony is sufficient to find the accused guilty.
It’s not a mantra but a fact. Try to deny it!
Obviously she cannot communicate about things she has never experienced and her ability to communicate is retarded but that does not mean that her intelligence is subnormal or that she is incapable of love, gratitude and appreciation - the things that really matter. Helen Keller’s knowledge of the physical world was minimal and she knew of it only via symbols but she developed extraordinary insight into reality as a whole (which far exceeds physical reality).
Are** all **your thoughts limited to your surroundings and experiences?
Science deals with the aspects of evidence, meaning reproducible predictive experience. You’re right that it limits what experiences it accepts, but this is on purpose.
Yes, the more witnesses the better, but it’s still not foolproof. For instance, in my own state:
ajc.com/news/us-supreme-court-orders-117260.html
Haha, it can be a fact and a mantra you know
You’re missing the major point. I didn’t say she couldn’t love or whatever. I simply stated that part of who we are is developed along with our bodies, which is evidence that it’s a physical aspect. This girl had no brain damage, there was nothing to keep a soul from using her brain like normal, the only thing wrong was that she didn’t develop socially and thus was handicapped.
Debatable actually, but probable. On one had you have this man who was born blind but can paint:
youtube.com/watch?v=R0wEaDHv0Ro
And on the other, you examine your own thoughts and realize that they almost always build upon previous thoughts or things you’ve seen in your life - it’s very hard to come up with original ideas. Perhaps it’s like our brains during development, in that we have a starting point but we must then develop from there to progress.
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ilovekittens
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What does that mean? What is the distinction? 40+ years ago, Wilder Penfield showed that very specific, complex, and reproducible conscious experience (vivid memories, sensory experience, etc) could be evoked by direct stimulation of the cerebral cortex. This would seem to be straightforward evidence that conscious experience originates in the brain.
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Moontown_Rabbit
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My contention is that the brain is nothing more than a sensory device that processes information from the eyes, ears, nerves and so on. Evidently the sense information provided by the brain is available to the rational soul and the rational soul can issue instructions to the brain. This means that there is some kind of bridge connecting the corporeal brain to the incorporeal soul. Poking the brain with a needle triggers a rational response in the soul via this bridge. This does not prove that the mind resides in the brain, it merely proves that the brain and mind are connected.
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liquidpele
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That’s a neat thought, but like I pointed out to tonyrey, it’s without any evidence and thus in the same category as your brain being controlled by the little things that make “the force” in star wars. So far every single thing about the brain seems to be consistent with a physical model, unless you know of evidence I don’t.
For instance (I use this video a lot, but I don’t recognise your name so maybe you have not seen it) this video has a neurologist talking about how when a certain region of the brain is damaged, a person will believe their own mother is an imposter! But only in person, over the phone it’s fine! Fascinating stuff.
ted.com/talks/lang/eng/vilayanur_ramachandran_on_your_mind.html
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Moontown_Rabbit
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When you say “the force” I assume you are referring the supernatural, that which “exceeds the material world and its sensory phenomena”. If the materialists are right and everything is matter of one kind or another, we should avoid using this word. If however we can identify even a single thing that is immaterial but is still objectively real, we could at least use the word supernatural to describe that one thing. I have a friend who is a die-hard materialist and I once asked him “OK, so what is the volume of Bach’s Invention No. 9?”. He couldn’t answer the question, nor could he provide me with a single material property of Bach’s Invention No. 9. You can measure area of the sheet music, the weight of the instruments used to play it, the loudness of it being played, and if you were mad you could try to measure the number of neurons engaged in someone performing it, but all of these measurements would be of physical things upon which the Invention impinges, not the Invention No. 9 itself. This is because Bach’s Invention No. 9 is wholly immaterial. It is an idea. So according to the definition above I can at least call Bach’s composition supernatural.
C.S. Lewis has an interesting argument that the mind must in some way be supernatural for if it is purely material it is subject to the same chance forces that we observe in other material systems. If it does not transcend what it observes, it’s judgments are no more true than the judgments of a magic 8 ball. Under such conditions the statement “the mind is material” has no more or less validity than the statement “Jupiter is made of cheese.” Lewis uses the metaphor of a man cutting his own legs off to describe such a materialist position.
I concede these arguments are not evidence in the laboratory sense. Experimenters demand empirical measurements, something that by definition cannot be provided in this case. All we can do is identify the limits of matter and ask if anything goes beyond it.
The video you refer to sounds quite interesting…
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ilovekittens
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But what is the need for (or proof of) an extracorporeal entity/ghost/soul, outside of theology? It is fairly clear from neuroscience research and clinical neurology that sensation, perception, decision, and action all arise from brain activity.
Of course the mind and brain are connected. The mind arises from brain activity.
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