I don’t oppose them. They are just off topic. I’ve answered your question about people attribute their “hallucination” to God. What atheist are you talking about that thinks a hallucination might be God?
I didn’t say it should be.
Do you see how off the mark you are? You are having some other conversation…
You misunderstand. My point is that science doesn’t have emotions, it’s the scientists that do the work, who have passions and feelings.
I think scientists are heroes. If I’d have had more focus and discipline I could a have been a pretty good one. But, alas, my body had other things on its mind, and the spirit had to play second fiddle.
Lausten, I agree with your statement, but so far as where I was wanting to go with this thread, it’s beside the point.
Or at least, it was a question for Write, rather than me.
[quote=“lausten, post:41, topic:10483”]
I didn’t say it should be.
Ok, this is what you said;
My question was if the term “god” should even be entertained by an “atheist”.
It sounds like a conflicting analogy.
Do you see how off the mark you are? You are having some other conversation…
[/quote]
I’m sorry to upset you, But I thought, as an atheist I was just offering my negative perspective on the use of the term god as a possible answer to anything.
If one even considers the term God as a possible fact, you are not an atheist but an agnostic, just like all the real believers, because no one knows God for a fact.
There is not a single proof except the recounting of hallucinatory experiences by the individual brains, that cannot be considered as communication from a god. It just adds to the mythology.
God is a fact of our thoughts and emotions, and by this point in evolution, I dare say embedded into our very DNA.
Our imaginations may be “meta-physical” but as you know, they can seem real as math to us.
[quote=“citizenschallengev4, post:44, topic:10483, full:true”]
God is a fact of our thoughts and emotions, and by this point in evolution, I dare say embedded into our very DNA.
That is exactly what I proposed earlier. I said that the concept of a god is an engram caused by the “unexplained and unexplainable” observed phenomena at a very early time in hominid evolution.
Mammals have lived with “unseen sky powers” for millenia
Our imaginations may be “meta-physical” but as you know, they can seem real as math to us.
[/quote]
I believe there might be different dimensions outside our ability to perceive, but so far almost all prior mysteries have been explained by science using mathematical descriptions of the mechanics of our spacetime geometry.
IMO, there is no doubt that spacetime (universe) has metaphysical mathematical properties that become expressed with the unfolding of natural patterns.
This has now gone from bizarre to totally absurd. We are talking about ineffable experiences, but I can’t say there is no evidence for god(s). There’s no conflict in my saying in that. We’re talking about human beings. Human beings have used certain words to describe certain things, the things we are talking about.
I’m not upset.
You have your own special rules for science. I’m not engaging with them.
This is very true and it’s why we have the scientific method, even in psychology and neuropsychology.
Good one. I like it.
When it comes to humans, I don’t think we should be doing the “shoulds” or “shouldn’ts” when it comes to the mythical and mystical. This is something that has happened since time immemorial. Humans went to animism to anthropomorphism concerning gods and in some beliefs, animals are still spirits.
This is true and at the end of the day, the idea of a deity of any sort is just a human creation and not a reality. Still, that doesn’t keep people from pondering various philosophies and different mythologies.
I still say numbers mean nothing and it’s the words describing what happens in the brain, the universe, etc that have more meaning. Numbers are not the end all and be all. You have to put it into words for it to have any meaning. The scientific method is words, not numbers.
"I agree and that’s why I use the generic term “value” rather than the symbols humans use to codify values.
Personally, I only read the narratives rather than learning and using scientific equations and formulas. As long as I understand the process in principle I am content.
In the end, it cannot be disputed that mathematics allows us to copy and use many natural mechanics with extraordinary success.
I like that.
I’d add that in every case those thoughts and practices developed to deal with very specific (and immediate personal/societal) needs. Which for the vast majority of mankind, was a very very different situation, from the one developed over past these 10,000 years or 200 years, or past half century.
But in the end those words need to register and mean something to the people receiving said message.
That’s what makes music so transcendent, it short circuits words, and can take the receptive spirit into realms as sacred and infinity and indescribable as it can get.
I think to answer the question, this summary needs to expand on the opening statement, that we are evolved biological machines. Saying how that human mindscape came to be will answer how the divide and religion and science fit in the reality.
I have been using the term “survival”, but even that has some meaning and purpose to it. I’m imposing some evolved conscious thought onto physics. I’ll keep using it for the sake of brevity, otherwise I would have to say something like “the underlying forces that cause the continuation of matter and create increasingly complex interactions”. Those forces don’t have a desire to survive, they don’t have desires at all, but they are still here, and we sense them and interpret them into our desires to interact with them, to keep them going, to live.
The forces of nature, or just call it reality, laid the foundation of spacetime, and that tugged and stretched for billions of years, until they evolved into what we now call biology. For a few more billion years, that biology had no formal way of describing itself. It had no clue how it got there. I think that’s what CC means by the divide. The mind evolved the ability to interact with the environment, but it had no memory of how that environment got there. The answers were all around, but the story took billions of years to be told and the minds were just blinks within that.
Music, language, myth, and math are attempts to write the story. In the short time a mind is here, it can see causes and effects. Extrapolating that to the idea that there must be forces that make everything was not difficult, but figuring out all those forces and their history has proved quite daunting. Only very recently, we have learned to value checking with others so we make fewer mistakes, to isolate interactions and develop principles that can be applied to other effects and observations, to look in to the very small and out to the very large and find time itself is flexible.
Appreciating our limits, the divide between what we can hold in our heads and what actually is, outside of those tiny minds, is a good place to start. It can be overwhelming when a young mind realizes that. When it sees there is a great big universe to discover, and that it doesn’t have it all figured out. It’s tempting to seek easy answers. It can also be exciting to remain in the questions, to stay open to infinite possibilities.
Who am I? I don’t know, but I’m going to keep looking into it.
I really believe we are a product of a probabilistic mutational event, through the accidental fusion of 2 chromosomes in an ancestor hominid into a single larger chromosome #2 , thereby creating new growth instructions for a larger more complex brain.
Note: Whereas humans and apes share some 97 % of the same genes, ONLY humans have a single chromosome 2 , created by the fusion of 2 ancestral hominid genes and IMO, this suggests that this singular event is responsible for the “sudden” emergence of “sapiens”.
All other apes followed a more leisurely evolutionary trajectory and it is obvious that it is only the larger human brain that allowed for the sudden rise of an apex species.
You keep making up terms. It’s apex predator. Despite our domination over things that can eat us, we are still stupid enough to destroy our own environment and fight over the world we dominate like fleas fighting over who owns the dog.
I use the term apex species purposely. We are an apex predator but we do have many weaknesses that make us prey to other apex predators.
Hence my choice of “apex species” as a less controversial and more appropriate term.
Apex predators are flesh-eating animals at the top of the food chain. Top predators have no known natural predators and occupy the highest trophic levels. Many types of apex predators date back as far as the Cambrian era when arthropods ruled the seas.
There is much debate about whether humans are considered apex predators. The consensus is that humans evolved as apex predators and dominated for about two million years, consuming primarily meat. Today we have a very diverse palette with many food options.
Discover these 15 types of apex predators and learn about why they dominate their environments.
We are however also an “invasive species”.
North American beaver dam in Tierra del Fuego
An invasive or alien species is an introduced species to an environment that becomes overpopulated and harms its new environment.[2] Invasive species adversely affect habitats and bioregions, causing ecological, environmental, and/or economic damage.[3]
The term can also be used for native species that become harmful to their native environment after human alterations to its food web – for example, the purple sea urchin (Strongylocentrotus purpuratus) which has decimated kelp forests along the northern California coast due to overharvesting of its natural predator, the California sea otter (Enhydra lutris).[4]
Since the 20th century, invasive species have become a serious economic, social, and environmental threat worldwide. Invasive species - Wikipedia
“Physical Reality is the physical world of atoms, molecules, universal laws of physics and Earth’s laws of nature. It is Earth’s dance between geology and biology and time and Earth’s evolving creatures, (and one in particular that learned to contemplate the universe and its short life ), along with everything else around us.”
" Human Mindscape is all that goes on inside of our minds. The landscape of your thoughts and desires and impulses and those various voices and personalities who inhabit our thoughts. The ineffable ideas that our hands can turn into physical creations, that changed our planet."
And the common ground; Reality-as-it-actually-is, being the non-relative infinitude of everything and nothing.
The immeasurable singularity of the undivided Whole.
This is the ultimate and enlightened, evolutionary focal point of both, science and religion.
Contemplating the question “Who am I?” equates to “Who is asking the question?” …to the nth degree. (meditation 101)
Existence/Experience is the self referencing of relativity. The continuum of THIS.
Yoga teacher explained that there are three elements, body, mind and conscience/inner being.
Body and mind give sensations and can be observed, while our conscience is. We cannot observe it as it is the subject, the observer.
One of the aims of yoga is to appease the body, then the mind to allow the conscience to wake up.
I was rather sceptical until he gave us a session of nidra yoga. I got a glimpse of his meanings.
But it’s all me, me, me, isn’t it?
Whereas appreciating how one actually embodies evolution within their own body, totally changes one’s outlook upon the world and our own interaction with it.