FYI, this is ‘admin color’. I like the old blue font, but we had to insert HTML for it. This one lets us just click a button.
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What gives you confidence of your assertions? Do you have scientific backing or do you have your little book? Did you even watch the video? Everything you say, concerning your beliefs, deals with attachment, neurology, and other psychological things. I don’t think you watched the video or even listened to it.
More trolling. Lightking’s question is basically the College Freshmen version of “oh yeah, says who?” I think the proper response is “Says me, times a million.”
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No one knows for sure (like in everything), but there is a greater chance theists are right because there is a high probability that this is some sort of a simulation and whoever it is that set it up they refer to as “God”. Also man has an inbuilt need to worship something.
“They” is whoever set up this our reality. What they want more than anything else is for us never to suspect that things may not be as we perceive them.
But there are slip-ups in the system - when a dead person briefly appears (oops!), or a child has clear memory of his past life (oops!), etc
I agree that belief based on nothing is nonsensical, but there may be facts that support the Christian belief
Or maybe not. Certainly nothing that proves an afterlife, or a connection between believing and getting there. It’s not that hard anymore to find websites that respond to every claim of a contemporary historical record of the person who is the central character of the gospels. Nothing of them rise about a 50/50 chance of being true.
What is your basis for determining if a historical document is accurate or not? This is a really important question. Everything else hinges on this.
Oh man, thanks for clearing that up. I would have never guessed that’s what you meant. Similar question to the above; how do you know what’s true?
I used to accept stories about ghosts or the ones about a kid remembering things as if they were alive 60 years ago, but, every time, and I do mean every time, that I spent more than a few minutes checking into it, I would find that what the kid said was easily something they could have overheard, they could have created a story from a few facts they got from a grandparent, or a book that was above their reading level. No one ever gets past the first level of investigation on these things.
No one knows for sure (like in everything), but there is a greater chance theists are right because there is a high probability that this is some sort of a simulation and whoever it is that set it up they refer to as “God”.
I would say that given what we know about the Universe, the probability of an Intelligent Designer is close to absolute zero.
Also man has an inbuilt need to worship something.
Irrelevant. And not true. I have no need to worship something.
“They” is whoever set up this our reality. What they want more than anything else is for us never to suspect that things may not be as we perceive them.
Why do you assume it is a “who” and not a “what”?
But there are slip-ups in the system - when a dead person briefly appears (oops!), or a child has clear memory of his past life (oops!), etc
That’s just pure woo. Products of subjective mental processes.
Watch this and you will get an idea about how your brain actually works and how you think.
Believing that you know how some God thinks and acts is just plain hubris.
I know that many people report have no need for this, so to say it is instinctual would be a stretch. Yet. There is wide agreement that this “need” is related to our overactive agency detection. But, once we learned better ways to figure out why lightning happens, or whatever, why do some/many ignore what we now call “evidence” and show a preference for just assigning agency?
I agree. It is known that prolonged periods in a sensory deprivation chamber may drive a person to start experiencing uncontrolled hallucinations and eventually go mad.
It seems that the mind craves “information”. If it is not available, it creates imaginary information.
Hilarious, you are.
You present a video that supports everything I’m saying, yet you’re still arguing.
See what the guy says, displayed in the pictures
Just as, believing that your senses imagines the world into existence, is just plain hubris.
We are creatures embedded within a physical reality, and our sense have been honed by our environments and change over time to do the best processing they can. It’s not realistic to assume some “correct” ground state, it’s all too dynamic.
I don’t know. There may be some facts that support Taoism too. However, there are a whole lot of facts that support scientific findings and none of it has anything to do with religion.
I also see that you have a lot of attachment issues and nothing we say will change that. See my video, “Why We Believe In Gods”, if you don’t understand what I’m saying.
One last thing:
Sorry I missed this one and no humans do not have an “inbuilt” need to worship anything. Again, I suggest you watch the video I posted about “Why We Believe In God”. The thing is the awe and wonder are neurochemical and that with the often times the unknown primitive cultures do worship such things as volcanos or anapormorphsize something to worship. As goes on, they realize that’s not a god and then move on once the knowledge about that object is acquired. Once people understand what all the current mythologies are about, they generally leave, but they do not generally turn to something else to worship unless they have a serious case of attachment disorder and feel the need to cling to something to worship. Otherwise, there is no built in need within humans to worship anything.
[quote=“citizenschallengev4, post:32, topic:8245”]
Just as, believing that your senses imagines the world into existence, is just plain hubris.
Why is that hubris? That’s how it works. Your senses don’t imagine anything all, they are honed for correct sensory experiences. Your brain does the imagining.
That is all the brain can do, imagine and predict (making a best guess), based on sensory information electrochemically relayed via the neural network to the brain, where it is compared with stored data.
Descartes;
“I’m walking outside”
The brain creates your subjective reality from sensory data, twice removed (encoded and uncoded). It predicts your reality.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2095809917305647#f0015
We are creatures embedded within a physical reality, and our sense have been honed by our environments and change over time to do the best processing they can. It’s not realistic to assume some “correct” ground state, it’s all too dynamic.
I agree. But the chessboard shows how our brain can fool us, even as it does so as a survival mechanism. That chess board clearly shows the guessing aspect of observing reality. Our senses actually see the same color, it’s the brain that refuses to accept it.
The proof lies in the fact that you cannot make your brain see the two squares as being the same color. It is mentally impossible. The difference in color is hallucinatory for a reason, survival.
OTOH, the example of the distorted auditory rendering of “I don’t like Bexit”. Can be made understandable by a mere auditory hint.
To me this is just so enlightening, it changed my understanding of brain function completely.
[quote=“lightking01, post:31, topic:8245”]
See what the guy says, displayed in the pictures
Yes, it’s your brain that creates reality, not some other Intelligence. And your brain is guessing about the information it receives to begin with.
And it making a “best guess” at that . Watch the Anil Seth clip, before you make selective examples of what he is NOT saying.
Actually this falsifies the concept of a God. God does not create your subjective reality, you do! We certainly do not all agree about the hallucination of an existing God. Therefore we cannot call it reality.
But the fact that you can hallucinate a God shows the subjectivity of that experience. Your reality is a product of your brain, blind, deaf, and locked in a dark bony skull.
When he talks about other consciousnesses, he does not imply the existence of a brainless consciousness. He is identifying all other brained creatures that create their own subjective reality.
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Exactly! All concepts of a god, any god, are human creations.
Yet all this is embedded in a consistent physical reality, and that it required
an evolutionary process to create real creatures, like us, with senses honed to navigating within this physical reality.
We live on an Earth full of real creatures of an amazing variety, they are all consistent entities in themselves - a mouse or centipede is the same mouse or centipede - no matter who’s sensing it, or what modes they are sensing it in.
Using that hallucination metaphor sets us up for all sort of wavy gravy, when the biological/geological reality that created us, has no place for wavy gravy dynamics, natural laws (and entities) are rigid and real as it gets.*
*rigid, in that if they don’t follow very specific biological parameters inside and out.
I’m sorry W4U, but we keep arriving at the same impasse. You are firmly entrenched within a mindscape centric perspective that has a proud western tradition with roots back to the self-centered Abrahamic religion outlooks, - as demonstrated by the notion you’ve explicated up there.
Nothing I can say will change that. That link you shared, that tells us ever more about the physical mechanisms at work within our sensing apparatus - but it doesn’t provide anything that disputes the fundamental Human Mindscape ~ Physical Reality divide.
Problems comes in with all the lay misunderstanding and interpretations and conclusions, like this insistence on the “hallucination” paradigm, which does little to help clarify what’s actually going on between us and our surroundings, along with us within ourselves.
I find it curious you don’t seem to be interested in tackling the problem from an evolutionary biological perspective al la Solms and Damasio.
W4U, I was just falling asleep and realized I got over zealous and tossed out the baby with the bathwater, so I need to back peddle a little.
It comes back down to the Mindscape, Physical Reality thing.
What I’m saying is limited to our dealing with the physical reality.
Whereas when it comes to our perceptions, predictions, problem solving, imaging what the other is thinking - that’s were we hallucinate our reality, and where I can understand that sort of paradigm.
Thanks, that’s a good thing to appreciate.
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[quote=“citizenschallengev4, post:38, topic:8245”]
Problems comes in with all the lay misunderstanding and interpretations and conclusions, like this insistence on the “hallucination” paradigm, which does little to help clarify what’s actually going on between us and our surroundings, along with us within ourselves.
I think you are taking this hallucination paradigm in a negative way.
Try to put a more positive slant on this. I see it more as imaginary ability than as a clinical condition.
I find it curious you don’t seem to be interested in tackling the problem from an evolutionary biological perspective al la Solms and Damasio.
Oh, but I am. Evolution is all there is . But I think there is evidence of a beneficial chromosomal mutation, that added something extra to the human clade of apes, and gave them mental abilities millions of years years ahead of normal evolutionary processes.
All great apes evolved in accordance to their DNA coding and display basically same levels of conscious self-awareness , except for Humans.
Moreover, all humans have 23 pr chromosomes and all apes have 24 pr chromosomes.
IMO, this is due to a mutation of an ancestor’s DNA by what is to become the Human chromosomes 2, which is a fusion of chromosomes 2p and 2q in older and modern apes and is twice as long as a normal chromosome in humans. That seems meaningful to me. A leap of complexity of an already intelligent pattern
And as Tegmark observes, “consciousness is an emergent quality” of complex mental data processing patterns.
“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts”, and may have some very interesting properties independent of pure physical processes.
The rest is according to standard evolutionary processes, Except for the fact that now we can build space rockets to the moon, instead of looking for just the right size rock to crack nuts with.
“Chromosome 2”, I believe there is a book hidden in that title and it is NOT the Bible.
And there is no afterlife. As Seth ends his lecture; “When the end comes, there is nothing to be afraid of. Nothing at all!”
I don’t think we are that far apart, except for some artificial details that may be due to our relative mindscapes.
We each have a different way to approach and pursue a complicated question. But I believe I can place myself in your reality, I have fairly keen mirror neural function and like to think of myself as being empathic to other people’s realities. They are so close anyway.
Some 8 billion different relative realities. All from a single chromosonal mutation.
But then, every living thing is an evolutionary miracle. Probability allows for just about everything, as is evidenced by just looking at the sky and see the complex patterns which dot the universe and imagine …
The devil lies in the detail… 