Why not address the whole talk instead of selective
I think u may have lost the thrust of my discussion:
Bump your head on a door knob or frame OR climb a tree and fall out of it, then let’s talk about the nature of reality. You can bump your head and fall out of tree if you like, just to be sure it was reality.
We’ve all heard Pascal’s wager before. It’s nothing new, but the fact is, there is no evidence for the supernatural and the experiences people have with it is all psychological.
[quote=“lightking01, post:41, topic:8245, full:true”]
Why not address the whole talk instead of selective
I addressed all there is to address. Any more would just be redundant.
I think u may have lost the thrust of my discussion:
I explained why I choose Atheism. That is the trust of the discussion, no?
- We have no way if knowing FOR SURE the true nature of reality
Science does not make such claims. It is always open to amendment, if sufficient evidence is presented.
- Therefore we can’t know for sure whether a supernatural exists but preponderance of evidence and experiences support that it does.
There is no evidence in support that a supernatural agent exists. Subjective experiences do not count as evidence. The brain is capable of imagining things that do not exist.
There is no evidence that a Flying Spaghetti Monster exists.
Yet there are a large number of believers in a FSM. It makes them feel good.
Do you believe that a FSM exists? If not, why did you choose your religion over Pastafarianism? Because your religion makes you feel good?
Therefore , by extension, we can make an educated guess that a supernatural agent of any kind does not exist until the need for its existence or evidence of its existence is produced.
But you still have not answered my inquiry into why you Choose Theism. What evidence do you have to support your case for Theism?
You know, write4u, we could ask him if he believes in Bast, because there is a lot of evidence she exists. If you catch my drift.
If I were to choose a God, Bast (Bastet) would be at the top of my list.
Her divine concept makes me feel good!
I think She is adorable… 
And she can purr. 
Dang straight I do! Look up the definition for “hallucination” - relying on that term leads to grand and sloppy hyperbole like this.
Again that self-centered echo of the Western religious/philosophical mindset. It’s all about me, and when I’m gone, there’s nothing. No when I’m gone, I’m gone, but the rest of the show continues. You don’t disappear, you are recycled into Earth.
¿¿¿. What about the rest of the real world, or children, or the dynamics you set into motion during your life? Why not take the time to be specific and realistic - For me, myself and I, it will be the end, but my life has reached beyond the confines of my own being and touched the real world out there. All of that will still exist when I myself disappear. Or? Why does all of that have to simply fall off the map, like how Seth leaves it?
It’s seem more like a Just So story, philosophizing rather than serious science - lots of truths but missing the point.
This morning I walked by our neighbors yard and was admiring the beautiful flowers she has this year. Really impressive and being my dad’s son and now with a camera constantly in my pocket I had to capture the moment. Then I looked at the picture and once again the picture was nothing like the scene I was looking at.
There was a narrow band of colors with a gray cluttered background, the funky shed, a bbq, yard tools, all that jazz in the background - In the picture it was all given the same weight to every sq. inch by sq. inch of that image. It’s a dramatic potent lesson of how our brain’s compose what we perceive. Look at the scene and the flowers fill the senses and there’s little room for the rest of it.
I don’t see how referring to that dynamic as a hallucination helps us along - and I believe that’s the problem with Seth being too lazy to find and coin an altogether different and more appropriate word for his story telling.
Of course, no coin has only one side.
Our minds do engage in a lot of hallucination, but those happen within our mindscapes, as we process information and make judgements about the state of mind of others, potential actions, etc.
The screaming point I am all about is how all that lofty philosophy/scientific story telling always seems to dismiss the absoluteness of this Earth, her biosphere and processes and the evolution that created us. Always shunting that reality of evolution, our Earth’s interwoven biosphere and climate engine and how we got here into some ,if not make-believe, distant irrelevant never contemplated nook.
If we could sense the reality of evolution and time flowing through us, things would look very different these days. But alas, we still want to quibble about the reality of time, hell reality itself.
I have come to believe that in the subconscious of people, even rationalists, resides a feeling we humans are set apart from the rest of Earth’s reality. Rather than simply being another creature within an amazing super organism (Earth’s biosphere) - we are the ones who achieved god like powers, but simply another creature of Earth nonetheless!
I do believe very few have actually soaked in that reality. Let alone really considered how we got here, and why appreciating that matters. It’s a tragedy.
I reckon, too busy earning our legal tender.
[quote=“citizenschallengev4, post:47, topic:8245”]
Dang straight I do! Look up the definition for “hallucination” - relying on that term leads to grand and sloppy hyperbole like this.
Ok, here is the accepted definition.
Hallucinations refer to the experience of hearing, seeing or smelling things that are not there . Often, these can be as intense and as real as sensory perceptions. There are different types of hallucinations. Hearing voices speaking when there is no-one there is known as an auditory hallucination.
Your mind can only hallucinate, i.e. cannot directly observe the outside world. Your mind does not see, hear, taste or smell anything. It experiences qualia, symbolic tokens.
It can experience the world only via electrochemical data that is being fed by the neural network . The brain is not a sensory organ, it is a translator of sensory data.
What is the difference between uncontrolled and controlled hallucinations?
If hallucination is a kind of uncontrolled perception, then perception right here and right now is also a kind of hallucination, but a controlled hallucination in which the brain’s predictions are being reined in by sensory information from the world .
In fact, we’re all hallucinating all the time, including right now. 18 July 2017 __ Anil Seth.
Again that self-centered echo of the Western religious/philosophical mindset. It’s all about me, and when I’m gone, there’s nothing. No when I’m gone, I’m gone, but the rest of the show continues. You don’t disappear, you are recycled into Earth.
Of course, that is a given.
When you die, it is only the conscious entity (brain in a vat) “YOU” that dies.
Your body is some 90% bacterial to begin with. The physical microbiome begins to decay and eventually gets recycled, via different means.
¿¿¿. What about the rest of the real world, or children, or the dynamics you set into motion during your life? Why not take the time to be specific and realistic - For me, myself and I, it will be the end, but my life has reached beyond the confines of my own being and touched the real world out there. All of that will still exist when I myself disappear. Or? Why does all of that have to simply fall off the map, like how Seth leaves it?
All that is true, but you are looking at this from the wrong perspective.
Anil Seth is not talking about your physical body or your physical/mental accomplishments .
He is only addressing the “mind” that is YOU. When your brain dies, YOU disappear.
When Anil Seth says ; “when the end comes there is nothing to be afraid of. Nothing at all”.
It means, only your mind ceases to exist, not your accomplishments . If you were an architect and designed beautiful homes, they still remain when you die. They don’t go poof up in thin air.
IOW, he is speaking directly about the “mind” that is You, not your legacy.
How does that relate to living people you leave behind?
It teaches that for them there is also nothing to be afraid of, which does away with the concept of burning in hell after you die.
Your legacy remains, but only for the living.
For You there will be nothing at all. Your brain and all its memories decay and disintegrate into unconscious biological molecules, to be redistributed into the raw building blocks of living things.
It’s seem more like a Just So story, philosophizing rather than serious science - lots of truths but missing the point.
You must read the story in context of the subject, which is Your state of consciousness , alive or dead.
Jesus did exist. He indeed was crucified on a cross. This is a historical fact.
I am very bummed right now, I lost a good many paragraphs I been working on since posting #48, I was really liking it, because there were some new thoughts in there. Sadly, thanks to interruptions both real world and connectivity, I lost post and I never made a backup copy which I try to do except when I really should have. And now my thoughts have been so derailed, it’s lost, back on the carousel, see if I can catch it next time around.
Think I need to save your last comment for later. Though I notice you still haven’t gotten what I’m trying to convey regarding our attitude towards physical reality. Simply saying it’s a given and dismissing it, is the problem. If it were actually a given, people would have an awareness of their direct connection with this planet - but instead everyone is still looking for answers in the cosmos (religiously and philosophically) and glorying in our own imaginative brains and the stories we can tell each other.
On second thought,
Like I said it’s poop term, you’re senses certainly receive physical input, those are relayed. Define the process!
Don’t give it a cheap sensational label and call it good.
“Hallucination” automatically implies perceived something that doesn’t exist, it’s right there in your definition. Our increasing understanding of the receiving and processing of the physical signals that our senses perceive is one thing. While the audience is being told stories that initiate much grander speculation.
Making that transition from the physical to our minds, the fulcrum for philosophical viewpoints questioning the solidity physical reality and all that is Earth’s biosphere, is horrendous in my book.
Donald Hoffman has probably earned million of that delusion. “Reality and time is doom” because some mathematical philosophers proclaim it so. That’s worse than manure, it’s waste you can’t do anything with. That’s what comes from using sloppy descriptions for complex dynamics.
[quote=“citizenschallengev4, post:51, topic:8245”]
If it were actually a given, people would have an awareness of their direct connection with this planet - but instead everyone is still looking for answers in the cosmos (religiously and philosophically) and glorying in our own imaginative brains and the stories we can tell each other.
When we open a grave we see the physical integration of the body including the brain. It is a given that those bio-molecules will be redistributed at some time . OTOH, if you get cremated , there is only a pot full of ash left (carbon).
There is only only a single hallucination of a “human resurrection” in all of history and that along with a hallucination of a "heaven"is the very basis for this discussion.
Hallucinating is all we do and we hallucinate everything a little differently by each individual brain processes of incoming data.
That is because our brains can only imagine what it is we are experiencing. It is impossible for the mind to have a direct sensory experience and each brain has a little different perspective of the environment. The underlying logic of Relativity.
Consciousness is an emergent ability during mental processes, not a direct physical sensory ability.
[quote=“citizenschallengev4, post:51, topic:8245”]> Hallucination.
Like I said it’s poop term, you’re senses certainly receive physical input, those are relayed. Define the process! Don’t give it a cheap sensational label and call it good.
You have identified how the conscious mind is removed from external reality and all it gets is secondary data relayed by the unconscious senses. The conscious mind does not perceive anything. It translates a stream of electro-chemical bits of data and makes a “best guess” of what that data represents.
Your reality is created from inside your brain as much as from the sensory reception of external data.
It’s not that I’m disputing, it’s your framing.
I notice you went from Hallucinate to Imagine - that’s telling. 
The senses do interact with actual physical stimulation, they in turn relay the information through physical means, so ?
I don’t dispute any of that. It’s the use you make of that information and the crazy making it leads to regarding the “solidity” of Earth and her constituents.
Actually I think a bit good faith homework would have you rewriting that sentence.
Experts in the field are increasing describing our “Mind” as the active “inside” reflection of our physical being. Which in turn, is embedded within a specific physical environment. Doing the best it can with the perceptual and motor skills it possesses. Precisely as is the case with all other living creatures and the way of evolution for the past half a billion years and more.
Dr. Mark Solms deftly demystifies Chalmers’ “Hard Problem” of Consciousness, while incidentally highlighting why Hoffman’s “Conscious Agents” are luftgeschäft.
(6.01) Dr. Mark Solms demystifies Chalmers’ “Hard Problem” of Consciousness.
(6.03) Students’ Resource: A representative cross-section of Dr. Mark Solms’ scientific publications.
and there’s so much more. Antonio Damasio, and his Self Coming to Mind is amazing, and I know there are a few other top tear scientists who have written more on the topic.
Thanks for the links. Give me some time t digest. I’ll be back… 
One immediate response confirms my narrative.
Quick response.; @ 10:40 in Solms “What makes Us Consciousness” he states (verbatim);
“When we die, we literally disappear” “So this is the gravity of the problem we are talking about.”
You’ve never established what you think a fact is, how you determine factuality. History is always a probability. Show me how you calculated this, based on what. On second thought, don’t bother me. Look up your facts, then look up the scholarly consensus on each one. Not some general statement from a bishop, the actual data behind the conclusion.
No it’s not. You don’t study his death in any history classes in college or in high school even. Nothing in the Bible is historically factual. There are many dying and rising gods, as well as gods hung on stauros. Jesus’ story is just more rewritten mythology.
The first-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, who according to Ehrman “is far and away our best source of information about first-century Palestine,” twice mentions Jesus in Jewish Antiquities , his massive 20-volume history of the Jewish people that was written around 93 A.D.
Thought to have been born a few years after the crucifixion of Jesus around 37 A.D., Josephus was a well-connected aristocrat and military leader in Palestine who served as a commander in Galilee during the first Jewish Revolt against Rome between 66 and 70 A.D. Although Josephus was not a follower of Jesus, “he was around when the early church was getting started, so he knew people who had seen and heard Jesus,” Mykytiuk says.
In one passage of Jewish Antiquities that recounts an unlawful execution, Josephus identifies the victim, James, as the “brother of Jesus-who-is-called-Messiah.” While few scholars doubt the short account’s authenticity, says Mykytiuk, more debate surrounds Josephus’s lengthier passage about Jesus, known as the “Testimonium Flavianum,” which describes a man “who did surprising deeds” and was condemned to be crucified by Pilate. Mykytiuk agrees with most scholars that Christian scribes modified portions of the passage but did not insert it wholesale into the text.
READ MORE : Explore 10 Biblical Sites: Photos
##Cornelius Tacitus, Tacitus connects Jesus to his execution by Pontius Pilate.
Another account of Jesus appears in [ Annals of Imperial Rome ], a first-century history of the written around 116 A.D. by the Roman senator and historian Tacitus. In chronicling the [burning of Rome in 64 A.D., Tacitus mentions that [Emperor Nero falsely blamed “the persons commonly called Christians, who were hated for their enormities. Christus, the founder of the name, was put to death by Pontius Pilate, procurator of Judea in the reign of Tiberius.”
As a Roman historian, Tacitus did not have any Christian biases in his discussion of the persecution of Christians by Nero, says Ehrman. “Just about everything he says coincides—from a completely different point of view, by a Roman author disdainful of Christians and their superstition—with what the New Testament itself says: Jesus was executed by the governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate, for crimes against the state, and a religious movement of his followers sprang up in his wake.”
“When Tacitus wrote history, if he considered the information not entirely reliable, he normally wrote some indication of that for his readers,” Mykytiuk says in vouching for the historical value of the passage. “There is no such indication of potential error in the passage that mentions Christus.”
Based on the independent mentionof Jeus’ trial and execution, I believe Jesus existed.
This, in no way, proves the Biblical account of Jesus being the son of God via “immaculate conception” or performing miracles. It merely suggest he existed and was a preacher who was convicted of blasphemy and crucified. A common practice in those days and still today. although today they just behead you with a machete./
TLDR;
The best historical record of Jesus was written 60 years after the Bible says he died, is controversial, and doesn’t comment on his divinity
write4u, that quote by Josephus he never actually wrote/said. It was doctor by Xians to make it sound like Jesus was historical, but there is no truth to it, but everything that was attributed to him was added later to make Jesus seem like he actually lived. If there ever was a Jesus of Nazareth, he wasn’t as portrayed in the Bible. The character portrayed in the Bible, never actually existed, any more than George Washington chopped down a cherry tree.
Here on some online resources that state that Josephus’ account was doctored to support the idea that Jesus was historical when he was not:
https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/7437
There are more sources, but some are not even in English. If you really need more to show that this was a false account and added later by Xians I can show you that too, but all one needs to do is pick up a college textbook to find that the Testimonium Flavianum is a falsified by Xians. Other languages do not have this quotation as it appears to English speakers.
