Here’s an interesting video about how faith is by nature unconvincing to reasonable people and has no place demanding agreement or punishing disagreement.
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Found this on reddit last week, then watched some of this guy’s other videos. Great stuff! Check out the ones about anecdotes and misunderstandings of science.
Thats my favorite part of FB!
What’s FB?
Yeah…that was meant to go to the post below yours…replying is hard (*duuuuuuh*)…sorry. And FB is facebook
I so wish I had the balls to post this on my fb page. Hmmm…..thinking about it. Just don’t want to start WWWIII with certain relatives.
I post this kind of stuff on FB all the time. I wish FB had a way to make certain posts ’sticky’. This may be the last link I ever post on FB.
So we do not know if god left the building or even is still alive. LOL
Also a none hysical being outside our universe that is not detectable and observable means that it does not interact with our universe and is of no importance if it exists or not since it has no possible connection with our universe. LOL
Read: “does not exist.”
Really, how else could we define existence?
Dunno. Do experiences, themselves, “exist”? Does information? What is the physical referent for love? Jealousy? Ennui?
Every experience you have leaves a physical imprint on your brain, if I’m remembering my neuroscience correctly.
You’re remembering correctly, but that’s like describing the substance of a car by pointing out tire tracks. I’m not asking what the substance of the memory of an experience is, I’m asking what the substance of an experience itself is. One might focus on the simple experience of conscious awareness and come to an impasse, as we can describe the experience of awareness (clumsily), but while it is subtended by material (brain matter) the experience isn’t the brain matter itself. Merleau-Ponty pointed out that even the location of the phenomenon of consciousness is problematic, as it seems to be extended in some ways throughout the body but in other ways focused on a single spatial point.
@Elemenope + Korny:
I would say it like this: Experiencing things is a process rather than a state. An experience will leave an imprint on the brain once it has occured, but this imprint is merely a residual state. The actual experience no longer exists and cannot be restored from this state because the information is missing (it has decohered into its environment, if you want to get technical).
Experiences do exist as physical phenomena (in the brain), but they’re transient. They’re destroyed the moment you actually experience them.
Theoretically, it should be possible to capture (most of) the information making up an experience, though.
I’m going to go contemplate those ideas while I do statistics.
“If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees.” – C.S. Lewis
I would add after “significance” also “coherence”.
Significance is a matter of perspective. Conscience/thought is significant to the individual, but may be insignificant to others. In the cosmic perspective it is wholly insignificant. We need to ask C. C. Lewis what his perspective is when he claims something like that.
As for coherence, this is something completely different. Here we’re talking about the mechanisms of thought rather than its perceived importance (or anyway that is what I gather you mean with “coherence”). This would be a discussion involving information theory, physics, and biology rather than philosophy and subjective values.
C.S., not C.C.
He’s being poetical. His point is that if the physical account is true, then we have no reason to believe anything, because thought is not causally efficacious. If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true, because they are nothing but the deterministic motions of atoms in my brain. But if that’s true, I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms, because that is simply a belief my brain has, which could not have been caused by a thought, but only by more random atomic interactions. The entirety of thought is swallowed up by the physical account, including the account itself.
You presuppose a deterministic world. Strip away determinism and your epiphenomenal paradox dissolves.
How so? If anything, AFAIK tell, it makes it worse, not better.
Quantum fluctuations, the universe is not that deterministic at microsocopic levels and lower. Your neurons are more influcenced by randomness because they are so small.
Actually, neurons are much too large to be influenced by quantum-level effects.
On the contrary, quantum effects causes radiation that in turn might hit a neuron that gets a puls and suddenly you get a bright idea.
Quantum effects could trigger a bit in an electronisc chip giving an error and turns into a blue screen, so you have to reboot and lost all your work. This time you have to redo it and make changes. Or worse it triggers a bit in the chip of a nuclear rocket so it launches itself sponatiously. This is why we have to add error checking in rockets.
The universe is not that deterministic at all!
Olaf, when you start repeating things comedic fantasy authors made up as a running jokes as real science, the world gets very strange.
Disregarding that the human brain does not work through quantum phenomena (this popular notion was recently theoretically disproved; I don’t have a link right now, but I can try to find it if people are interested), I find it plausible that randomness may influence our surroundings, which in turn can influence our lives.
If so, how does this relate to our consciousness and our ability to make truly autonomous decisions? Actually, I think it very likely that consciousness is indeed an epiphenomenon, even in a random world, but I may be wrong, which would open up the possibility that we can be more than simple stimulus/response machines controlled by the physical world.
However, as interesting as it is to contemplate such matters, I usually take a pragmatic view: We may or may not be simple automatons, but how much does it really change? It sure feels like I’m making my own decisions, so does it really matter if I don’t, especially considering that we probably won’t ever be able to tell for certain if it is the case? It’s like discussing solipsism or regarding the limits of logic (cf. Gödel’s theorem). I accept that some things can’t be known or proven. These are the rules of life.
Here’s the link: Study Rules Out Fröhlich Condensates in Quantum Consciousness Model.
Julian Jaynes—-> The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. :D
No. Information has no existence separate from the medium that contains it. Consciousness is an illusion. But it’s a useful illusion. I think free will is also illusory, but it is powerful, the feeling that I have a choice affects what choice I make; it’s not useful to try to act as if I do not have free will. In the future tense I have a choice, in the past tense it’s no use crying over spilled milk when all the forces of the universe were bent on spilling it. (Of Human Bondage paraphrase.)
love, jealousy are measurable and observable things.Chemicals, electrical,…
No, the physical processes which seem contemporaneous with those emotions can be observed and measured. However the conscious perception, the act of experiencing, cannot.
the counsious perception is measurable electrically and chemically. There is nothing mystical about it, just chemoelectrical impulses processed by the brain.
the conscious perception is measurable electrically and chemically…
…says you? Who has claimed to directly measure the electrochemical process of consciousness?
And who said anything about mysticism?
In a similar way to how data about light bouncing around is captured by your eyes and translated by your brain as “sight”, forms and colors and bodies, chemicals sloshing around and electrical impulses are translated by your brain as “consciousness”, feelings and perceptions and ideas.
I don’t think there is an ethereal “me” anywhere, any more than there is a miniature moving picture somewhere in my brain corresponding to what I see. I think there is no such thing as consciousness, merely a perception of consciousness, which is functionally identical (by definition) to actual consciousness.
Look at the experiments where the guy puts vision googles that transmits the images taken from the camer put in a doll’s eyes. So this guy observers himselfs through the eyes of a dummy. The counsious believes that it is inside the dummy or gets confused especially when the guy stabs the dummy with a nife.
Look what happens if you are in a movie theater, some moment you actually believe to be in that movie, especially when something scary is happening.
Clear evidences of sensory input sound and vision. Converted to electro chemical impulses.
Now remove all sensory input like these dark soundproof floating watertanks and pbserve how your cousious has no clue anymore where it is.
rodneyAnonymous, I agree the concept counsious/uncounsious is not that easy to separate since they are basically the same thing. It seems to be the amount of neurons working together at one focussed point that gives the illusion as counsios.
A bit similar like the spiral arms of galaxies, there are no such thing as spiral arms when seeing from every star point of view. There exists density waves where stars orbitting faster catches up slower moving stars a bit further.
But if you like it or not, you can shut down the counsious with simple electro chemical methods. Just zap somone with a electric shock or give him a sleeping pill, it shuts down the counious. This clearly shows that it is something physical.
There is also a misconception of the cousious. It is not on all the time, it is more off than on. It is like a light bulb that changes brightness and focus depending if the light needs to be directed and focussed at one point or spard for global illumination.
Elemenope try this as an example:
http://www.elements4health.com/mri-scans-accurately-diagnose-alzheimers-disease.html
“The Florida researchers used a new visual rating system to evaluate the severity of shrinkage, or atrophy, in the brain’s medial temporal lobe, specifically in three structures essential for the conscious memory of facts and events. They compared the MRI brain scans of 260 people, a group with probable Alzheimer’s, two groups with varying degrees of mild cognitive impairment (mild memory problems), and a control group of normal elderly with no discernable memory loss. ”
Basically remove some parts of the brain that are responsible for the counsious memory and your counsious dissapears. Clearly physical.
Also this:
“Recent brain studies investigating the electromagnetic theory of consciousness explores the possibility that the electromagnetic field generated by the brain is the actual carrier of conscious experience. The starting point for the theory is the fact that every time a neuron
fires it also generates a disturbance to the surrounding electromagnetic (EM) field. Information coded in neuron firing patterns accounts for how information located in millions of neurons scattered throughout the brain can be unified into a single conscious experience:the information is unified in the EM field. When neurons fire together their EM fields combine to generate stronger EM field disturbances; so synchronous neuron firing will tend to have a bigger impact on the brain’s EM field (and thereby consciousness) than the firing of individual neurons. ”
http://www.memoryzine.com/whatisconsciousness.html
The fact that people don’t drop unconscious when they stand under high-tension power lines or next to an MRI machine (never mind *in* one) makes the EMF theory of consciousness a little…unlikely.
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The link about Alzheimer’s deals with conscious memory (i.e. recall) not *the experience of consciousness*, which is what I am claiming you can’t measure or point to a physiochemical basis for.
“I think there is no such thing as consciousness, merely a perception of consciousness”
I wonder what the chemical sequences are for sadness, humor, or hate. We know they are all different. Could you make someone hate if you injected a certain chemical? This is one of the arguments of intelligent design. Why humor? What art? It does not serve survival does it? Or does being really funny or being a great painter ensure your survival?
“the counsious perception is measurable electrically and chemically. There is nothing mystical about it, just chemoelectrical impulses processed by the brain.”
I tend to agree with this but it’s quadrillions of interactions between neurons and chemicals. The act of wanting to kill yourself could be 100+ trillion chemical interactions between neurons. What you’re saying is “JOY” can be a chemical reaction. What if the drug of the future is this:
Hear’s a packet of pure JOY?
Here’s a packet of pure spontaneous sex that you should not be having and would feel incredibly dirty, wrong and guilty but at the same time awesomely love it?
You take the packet then suddenly feel shame. Where would the “shame” come from? There should be an entire discussion on “shame” – Where does “shame” and “guilt” come from????
@Vidlord: Why humour?
Laughing is wonderfully good for you. It boosts your immune system, encourages blood flow and some of these good responses are out of proportion with the amount of laughing you do. Tada, direct fitness benefit to having a functional sense of humour.
Painting? Maybe needs more work.
I think so, yes.
Also, many characteristics that do not themselves “serve” survival, but are attached to traits that do. Creativity, for instance.
Exactamundo: I have little doubt that creativity and intelligence are linked in the brain and the Darwin Awards are proof enough that intelligence increases fitness (although not neccesarily reproductive success).
Consciousness is an illusion.
I disagree with the other statements on what I’m sure are grounds of fundamental metaphysical disagreement, but the one above literally doesn’t make sense. How can consciousness be an illusion? Illusion is defined by a distortion in the perception of reality, a deception. In order for deception to exist, there needs to be a consciousness being fooled by it, no? I’ll give you that consciousness may be an epiphenomenon, but the notion of it being an illusion is incoherent.
Free will, on the other hand, that might be a total crock.
You just wanted to use the word “epiphenomenon”.
Obviously, yes, perception is not a distorted perception, but that’s not the only definition of the word. I mean, the brain machinery creates the consciousness/perception/selfness application, that doesn’t actually exist on its own, but has the effect of behaving precisely as if it did.
Actually the universe does not care if you agree or not.
It is what it is.
I wasn’t disagreeing with the universe. I was disagreeing with Rodney.
It does not matter who you disagree to, the universe does not care.
True. The universe does not care which of us is right. What’s your point? I disagree with rodney (and it seems, you) about certain aspects of how the universe works. I have no reason to believe that you are more informed or have special access to truth that I do not. Neither of our beliefs ultimately bear on which way the universe actually works.
I am not asking you to believe me, just check for yourself.
I have. I have come, after observation and analysis, to different conclusions than you have. Is that so hard to understand?
So you actually think that your observations and analysis are actually true?
And there are no other explanations that comes to the same results?
Yes, Olaf. I believe that my conclusions are true. That’s why they’re *my conclusions*. Do I believe there are plausible alternative explanations of the same data? You bet.
I’m still not getting your point. People can differ honestly about what evidence indicates. You seem to be quite convinced that you are correct. Do you think there are plausible alternative explanations?
You could pretend that the universe is different, but the universe does not care, it just is even if you agree to it or not.
Another tasty freethought dish with minty fresh logic brought to us by Qualia Soup. Yum!
I don’t think it’s so much about whether god exists but what is the point of OUR existence. There has to be some reason for us to be here right? It seems entirely illogical that there would be no purpose for us. We must have a purpose – hence all religion.
What if some astronauts travel to mars. They land, start setting things up, then suddenly they see a massive comet destroy earth. This is similar to that big wave that killed 200,000. Ok so earth is destroyed and we have a few astronauts on mars. One of them says ‘wow what was the point?’
And that’s the kicker – what WAS the point?
What if the answer to this question is simple: there is no point.
Why does there have to be a reason for our being here? It’s only human vanity that says so. The religious argument that without a reason our lives are meaningless seems badly flawed to me.
The universe does not need a human logic to do stuff. It even does not care about your existance to be important or not.
You have to define yourself if your existance is pointless or important.
You have to decide if you blindly follow some nut that promisses anything but has no proof and might be fake or if you decide for yourself that you want to help people in this world or not.
Even though I am atheists I do make this world a better place for anyone that I meet.I give everything I have to others.
The videos by Qualia are excellent.
Everything sounds so much better when said with a British accent!
I was thinking the same thing :)
He sounded Australian to me :)
Wow. How good was that….
The narrator can not conceive of a higher faculty than that of reason or logic from which reality/truth is deduced, for it is all he has ever known. So, with this as his reference point he (naturally) misses the mark and thus concludes wrongly since the premise itself is faulty. As long as we continue to yield to, bow down to and worship the false gods of human Reason and Logic then we will be forever subject to their (severe) limitations and distorted lens.
…until the moon (it’s light which has no light, is merely a reflection compared to the sun, is changeable, not a constant) is no more…Ps 72.7. Then in Rev 12.1 we see the woman (bride) “clothed with the sun and the moon (now in its pace) under her feet”. Reason in its place.
As long as we insist on walking by our own dim light (which is no light at all) we will be as the “blind leading the blind”. Who longs for the More (which He is) the True Light? Anyone?
It’s funny that you should keep trying to convince us with words. Your own words and/or interpretations directly from bible verse. You are biased by your own sense of logic and reason, in fact, in basis of nothing, to continue to speak and write your way in. You are simply a guy with words, you have no proof that what you say is true, only delusion, or if it pleases you, conviction. That is as you call reason and logic “distorted,” but what you have is nothing. You offer nothing, not a thing. You say things, meaningless, outlandish things that are made up by people, people who fear reason and logic or cannot themselves use their brain to conclude logical and reasonable things. They make up or believe made up stories in the place – they’re not anything more than imaginary. Your god and your heaven is imaginary. You like that lens because it feeds and comforts you spiritually, but we aren’t believing your words because they aren’t true, not just don’t sound true, are. not. true. So knock it the eff off, John.
Kodie, thank you. John C regurgitates the pap he’s been fed, and seemingly doesn’t understand that we’re not interested.
John C: find a different brick wall to bang your head against.
Cheers!
well said Kodi. JC doesn’t even realize that without his reason he wouldn’t have the capacity to suppress it. It’s like poking out your eye to spite your face. For him it is emotional. It’s a feeling. He “feels” it deep inside and thusly “knows” the truth.
Reason is but a silly little pest when compared to the vastness of this feeling! No doubt he laughs at all us little reasoning, logical monkeys – caught up in this material world and ignorant of the vast and compelling Love he feels. We are blind children in God’s loving flock. He knows because he feels. He wants to share the drug that he is high on. The drug of emotion. It seems odd to him that we cannot feel the same things he is feeling. It reminds me of someone high on crack walking around, feeling good, looking at the world with glossed over eyes, wondering why everyone else is not feeling the love.
He is but a slave to the emotional and feeling regions of his brain. There is comfort, security, and love there. There is no fear there. It is a safe place.
Olaf:
“the universe does not care if you agree or not”
I love that. That is my new favorite saying.
If logic and reason are false gods, please explain how else we can reliably know things. Personal experience? Notoriously unreliable. Scriptures? Let’s not even go there. While not everything can be reached by logic and reason, no knowledge worth having contradicts it. It is a favourite ploy of the religious to debunk logic and reason, yet no-one has been able to provide an alternative. Knowledge is NOT a sin – it just frightens the c*** out of the religious authorities when people start to think for themselves.
Michael…I am not debunking reason and logic, only when they are unto themselves an island. The alternative that He offers is this…walking in the spirit of God. Sounds phooey to the natural mind I know, it once did to me as well. But, after journeying with Him intensely, even foolishly trusting, believing His heart for us and true nature I have come to a place of great peace, some (foolish, ha) insight into the liberty that He offers. JC said “God is Spirit”, not a spirit but Spirit Himself. That same Spirit would abide in us and “walk with us in the cool (refreshing, peaceful) inner gardens of our hearts/consciousness. God is IN His creation, that’s the secret, He is not apart from or “up there”, but rather as Paul revelated…Christ IN you is the mystery of the ages. Col 1.27. I simply believed the truth-that set me free. All the best.
Yes, I’m sure that utter abdication of rationality and the responsibilities a rational lifestyle place on us is very emotionally freeing. So is shooting up heroin. Neither means of getting a cheap emotional high is actually worth the price, though.
That’s true. Heroin has been priced right out of the market, lately.
:)
You lack the guts to admit that you are a proselyte, John. Each time you play your little witness game people see what you are doing and realize that by pretending that you aren’t proselytizing you are showing us that you are ashamed of your own actions. You wouldn’t pretend you weren’t doing it unless you felt it was somehow shameful and wrong.
If only you had the courage of your convictions.
My experiences is that reasoning and logic creates things.
Believes destroys things.
This is outstanding. My 13 yo son is struggling with theist friends who are telling him that he’s the “antichrist” because he’s an atheist, and that he needs to prove to them that there isn’t a god (WTF)??
But I also need to remind him that theists are unreasonable about these things. They only want to criticize him to make themselves feel superior.
First off, they’re not his friends. And they’re scared little beings who only regurgitate what their parents spoon fed them–also, their religiosity becomes part of the middle/high school pecking order (if it wasn’t your son’s atheism, it might bloody well likely be something else).
I agree with you 100%. I know that part of the reason my son is an atheist is because I raised him to be one. That being said, I think it’s pretty awesome that a 13 yo is trying to rationally put together his beliefs.
I also don’t know if those kids realize what a bad face they put on Christianity by hassling him. Like he’s going to want to go to one of their churches…
I was grateful that my parents never imposed silly superstious beliefs on me, and I hope my son will say the same thing as he gets older.