The Soul

[torridon]

No...I think you are avoiding the obvious simply because it takes you out of your comfort zone.

The unconscious mind is far  more complex and important than you are willing to admit. You really must come out of the old school science mindset.... 

**************

“The conscious you, which is the part that flickers to life when you wake up in the morning, is the smallest bit of what’s happening in your head.
“It’s like a broom closet in the mansion of the brain.”

David Eagleman, Neuroscientist.

**************

Taking into account different findings on Consciousness such as...

Freud on the power of the Unconscious, Jung on the collective unconscious,  the Copenhagen Interpretation of QM,  Wheeler on Participatory Anthropic Principle, Chalmers on Panpsychism, Toroni on Integrated Information theory, Eagleman on the Unconscious mind.....and many others....

the idea of the unconscious mind having a dramatic influence on us and the world around us seems to be gaining ground.  It is not just a store room of repressed memories.  It is much much more...and is probably running our lives and the world.

That's something of a mashup of well-established ideas with fringe ideas, as if they were part of a coherent consensus.  I haven't heard anything from Eagleman in support of Wheeler's strong anthropic principal for instance.  Broadly speaking the unconscious mind is all of mind apart from that which is currently conscious; consciousness being the prioritisation of information flows.  No point in focusing on remembering to breathe when there is a leopard bearing down on you. There's nothing spooky or controversial in that; a mind that did not prioritise would be a dead mind.

[Stranger]

Its simply about objective evidence versus subjective experience. My point is simply that objective evidence is not always possible because ultimately everything is experienced subjectively....(like light).  If people lack certain faculties they will not be able to experience certain things however real those may be.  They will have to go with faith and trust.   If people are stubborn enough they could keep denying phenomena simply because they cannot experience it.

And if people are stubborn enough they stick to obviously ridiculous 'arguments' no matter how many times the absurdities are pointed out to them. If people deny something (like light or X-rays) in the face of objective evidence, they are being irrational - it has nothing to do with whether they can directly experience it or not, and there is no need for faith.

[Walt Zingmatilder]

And if people are stubborn enough they stick to obviously ridiculous 'arguments' no matter how many times the absurdities are pointed out to them. If people deny something (like light or X-rays) in the face of objective evidence, they are being irrational - it has nothing to do with whether they can directly experience it or not, and there is no need for faith.

Not the old science versus religion suite of bollocks again?
Time to change the record?

[Stranger]

Not the old science versus religion suite of bollocks again?

No.

[bluehillside Retd.]

Sriram,

Blue....this could go on forever....! 

Its simply about objective evidence versus subjective experience. My point is simply that objective evidence is not always possible because ultimately everything is experienced subjectively....(like light).

Ultimately nothing can be known with absolute certainty, but within that paradigm there are gradations of truth values. It’s probabilistically more true that the sun is 93m miles away than that there’s a dragon in my garage, let alone that I‘ve invented the four-sided triangle. The “well it’s all subjective anyway” line is called going nuclear, and it fails.     

If people lack certain faculties they will not be able to experience certain things however real those may be.

No, they will experience them still but they may not be aware of it. You experience X-rays even though you can’t sense them.

They will have to go with faith and trust.

Or reason and logic.

If people are stubborn enough they could keep denying phenomena simply because they cannot experience it.

You’re still not getting it. If for some reason someone could neither experience nor grasp the reasoning for light (to take your example) then all he'd have to go on would be an assertion that it existed, in which case he’d be right to reject the claim. Just as he would for claims of phlogiston and Scotch mist made on exactly the same basis of unqualified assertion.

Try to grasp the point here – from the preceptive of the audience (and for that matter from the perspective of the claimant) if an assertion has no reasoning or evidence to support it, then there’s no reason to accept it even if just as a matter of dumb luck it happens to be true.   

[Sriram]

Who are all these stubborn people ?  Nobody can 'experience' x-rays personally, but I've yet to hear of accident victims refusing to have their suspected fractures x-rayed because they stubbornly refuse to believe in them.

torridon and Blue,

We accept x rays as a fact simply because we have seen x ray films of our bones. If we hadn't, we would have to go on faith. We accept cosmic rays, gamma rays, Dark Energy,  Dark Matter, 11 dimensions etc. simply on faith....because we trust scientists. They could actually be wrong  on many of this.

My point is simple. Evidence and proof of objective reality isn't as simple as we think.  Just because people demand proof or evidence does not mean it can be produced. Can anyone produce proof that the earth is going around the sun? Can we be taken into space and shown the earth orbiting the sun?  Can it be proved beyond doubt that we landed on the moon (there are skeptics!)?  No....it can't be done. But we all accept it as fact largely on faith.

Similarly, it is not always possible to prove or provide evidence for our experiences. 

Most of you tend to think that 'experiences' automatically mean imaginative, delusional, wishful thinking.   That is not necessarily so.   'Experiences' can be real and can provide a window into another aspect of reality. 

[Sriram]

That's something of a mashup of well-established ideas with fringe ideas, as if they were part of a coherent consensus.  I haven't heard anything from Eagleman in support of Wheeler's strong anthropic principal for instance.  Broadly speaking the unconscious mind is all of mind apart from that which is currently conscious; consciousness being the prioritisation of information flows.  No point in focusing on remembering to breathe when there is a leopard bearing down on you. There's nothing spooky or controversial in that; a mind that did not prioritise would be a dead mind.

This is typical Zoom-In thinking.  Has anyone provided an integration of QM and Relativity yet?

The ideas I have given are an enigma in themselves.  Putting them together is the next step.

The fact is that our Unconscious mind is an unknown quantity and from several research areas (that I have highlighted) it seems that understanding it would open up many new frontiers that could make current science look like alchemy.   

[bluehillside Retd.]

Sriram,

We accept x rays as a fact simply because we have seen x ray films of our bones.

No we don’t. We accept the fact of X-rays for a variety of reasons – there’s a lot more than “faith” in the images to go on.

If we hadn't, we would have to go on faith.

No we wouldn’t if we had reason and logic to go on too.

We accept cosmic rays, gamma rays, Dark Energy,  Dark Matter, 11 dimensions etc. simply on faith....because we trust scientists. They could actually be wrong  on many of this.

Wrong again. Some of these things have evidence to support them but in any case when there isn’t evidence we “accept” them only as conjectures and hypotheses, not as facts.

This isn’t difficult.

My point is simple.

And wrong.

Evidence and proof of objective reality isn't as simple as we think.

Who’s “we”?

Just because people demand proof or evidence does not mean it can be produced. Can anyone produce proof that the earth is going around the sun? Can we be taken into space and shown the earth orbiting the sun?  Can it be proved beyond doubt that we landed on the moon (there are skeptics!)?  No....it can't be done. But we all accept it as fact largely on faith.

I explained in my last reply to you why this is wrong (your going nuclear problem). Why have you just ignored the explanation and repeated the mistake?

Similarly, it is not always possible to prove or provide evidence for our experiences.

“Our experiences” are just that – experiences. If you want to rely on them for the explanations for the phenomena we experience though then you need reason and evidence. The alternative of guessing (or, as you would call it, “faith”) is worthless for that purpose.   

Most of you tend to think that 'experiences' automatically mean imaginative, delusional, wishful thinking.

Straw man. Who thinks that? No-one here that I can see. Experiences are real enough, The problem comes when you use faith for the explanatory narratives for those experiences.

That is not necessarily so. 'Experiences' can be real and can provide a window into another aspect of reality.

No-one says that “experiences” aren’t real. What’s actually said is that when you introduce faith to explain those experiences then you have no means to know whether you’ve found “another aspect of reality” or just made a wrong guess.

That’s your problem here.

Incidentally, I just explained why your blind/non-conceptualising person would be right to reject the unqualified assertion “light”. As you just ignored it, do you now understand where you went wrong there?

[bluehillside Retd.]

Sriram,

The ideas I have given are an enigma in themselves.

No, the "ideas you have presented" are just wrong for the reasons you've been given.   

[SteveH]

Sriram,

Ultimately nothing can be known with absolute certainty, but within that paradigm there are gradations of truth values. It’s probabilistically more true that the sun is 93m miles away than that there’s a dragon in my garage, let alone that I‘ve invented the four-sided triangle.

We can be absolutely certain that you haven't invented a four-sided triangle, because it's a logical contradiction. Therefore, there are some things that can be known with absolute certainty: deductive truths. It's inductive statements that can't be absolutely proved or disproved.

[jeremyp]

Sriram,

Ultimately nothing can be known with absolute certainty, but within that paradigm there are gradations of truth values. It’s probabilistically more true that the sun is 93m miles away than that there’s a dragon in my garage, let alone that I‘ve invented the four-sided triangle. The “well it’s all subjective anyway” line is called going nuclear, and it fails.     

The triangle thing is qualitatively different to the dragon thing and the Sun thing. We know with 100% certainty that you have not discovered a four sided triangle because the definition of "triangle" is "shape with three sides".

We do not know for certain that you do not have a dragon in your garage, but since there is no verifiable evidence for dragons and your garage is probably quite small and therefore amenable to an exhaustive search, we can be pretty certain.

The Sun thing is more tricky. First of all, it is not 93 million miles away, or if it is now, it won't be by the time you read this post (the Earth-Sun distance varies between about 94.5 million miles and 91.5 million miles). Secondly, the Earth-Sun distance is measured using a series of extremely expensive experiments, that anybody could, in theory, repeat, but probably won't in practice. We do take the scientists' word for it, but we trust the scientific method to root out the mistakes.

[bluehillside Retd.]

Jeremy,

The triangle thing is qualitatively different to the dragon thing and the Sun thing. We know with 100% certainty that you have not discovered a four sided triangle because the definition of "triangle" is "shape with three sides".

Yes I know. I included it though to keep the analogy with religious claims. Some such claims are at least conceptually possible (a resurrection for example) whereas others are necessarily falsified by their inherent contradictions (AB’s “soul” for example, which is why he has to invoke magic to get off the hook).

We do not know for certain that you do not have a dragon in your garage, but since there is no verifiable evidence for dragons and your garage is probably quite small and therefore amenable to an exhaustive search, we can be pretty certain.

Quite. Not absolutely so, but certainly beyond any practical need to take the claim seriously.

The Sun thing is more tricky. First of all, it is not 93 million miles away, or if it is now, it won't be by the time you read this post (the Earth-Sun distance varies between about 94.5 million miles and 91.5 million miles).

You know the point I was making. That’s a difference without significance.

Secondly, the Earth-Sun distance is measured using a series of extremely expensive experiments, that anybody could, in theory, repeat, but probably won't in practice. We do take the scientists' word for it, but we trust the scientific method to root out the mistakes.

That’s missing the point. There are various means of calculating the sum that don’t require telescopes (Aristarchus used Hipparchus' calculation of the Earth-Moon distance, who in turn used Eratosthenes' calculation of the Earth's circumference to calculate the Earth/Sun distance for example); mistakes or faking of the answer would require a global conspiracy or incompetence of such enormity and robustness as to put us in “dragon in the garage” territory etc.

The point though is that all these various and independent methods coalescing on the same answer probabilistically give us a much higher truth value than the unqualified assertion of, say, “there’s a dragon in my garage”. Sriram tried the going nuclear option of “we can’t know anything with certainty in any case” as if that made all truth claims epistemologically equal, and I was just explaining to him why they’re not.

I don’t suppose it’ll register though.     

[Enki]

Jeremy,

Yes I know. I only included it though to keep the analogy with religious claims. Some such claims are at least conceptually possible (a resurrection for example) whereas others are necessarily falsified by their inherent contradictions (AB’s “soul” for example, which is why he has to invoke magic to get off the hook).

Quite. Not absolutely so, but certainly beyond any practical need to take the claim seriously.

You know the point I was making. That’s a difference without significance.

That’s missing the point. There are various means of calculating the sum that don’t require telescopes (Aristarchus used Hipparchus' calculation of the Earth-Moon distance, who in turn used Eratosthenes' calculation of the Earth's circumference to calculate the Earth-Sun distance for example); mistakes or faking of the answer would require a global conspiracy or incompetence of such enormity and robustness as to put us in “dragon in the garage” territory etc.

The point though is that all these various and independent methods coalescing on the same answer probabilistically give us a much higher truth value than the unqualified assertion of, say, “there’s a dragon in my garage”. Sriram tried the going nuclear option of “we can’t know anything with certainty in any case” as if that made all truth claims epistemologically equal, and I was just explaining to him why they’re not.

I don’t suppose it’ll register though.   

I don't think that it will register with Sriram also, Blue. When I suggested quite truthfully that I have had certain 'experiences' which overwhelmingly suggested to me that there was no conscious universal existence in the universe, his response was to accept that people might have different interpretations of their experiences, and then to go on to suggest that that is why there are different ideas and images of God etc. This, of course, totally ignored the point that my experiences were lacking in any God concept at all.

All he could add was that this doesn't alter the fact that such influences and patterns do exist in our lives, and yet he ignored the fact that because of their wide range and often contradictory nature(as witnessed, for instance, by my experiences) they cannot, on their own, be trusted to be any sort of a guide as to what reality is in any objective sense. I actually ended by saying that 'The only way to judge such things would be to collate evidence by as an objective a method as possible surely.' but this also seems to have been entirely lost on him.

So, I agree, I don't think that it will register with him at all.

[Sriram]

 

What I am saying doesn't register with any of you. Why would you expect anything you say to register with me?!!!   So, learn to discuss without getting annoyed or impatient or angry.

Coming to your point enki. Your experience of no conscious universal existence is nothing new. Check on Theravada Buddhism. It is a common experience.   You should know how to interpret it.

[bluehillside Retd.]

Sriram,

What I am saying doesn't register with any of you. Why would you expect anything you say to register with me?!!!

Because (naively perhaps) some of make the initial assumption at least that the person we’re dealing with has at least some grasp of rational argument.

So, learn to discuss without getting annoyed or impatient or angry.

More frustrated I’d say at your unwillingness or inability to engage with the arguments. I explained to you for example why the person who couldn’t conceptualise light would be right to reject the unqualified assertion “light” (thereby falsifying your analogy), yet you just ignored that. Why? 

Coming to your point enki. Your experience of no conscious universal existence is nothing new. Check on Theravada Buddhism. It is a common experience.   You should know how to interpret it.

How would you propose that someone "interpret” something when you have only personal faith to suggest it exists at all?

[bluehillside Retd.]

Hi enki,

I don't think that it will register with Sriram also, Blue. When I suggested quite truthfully that I have had certain 'experiences' which overwhelmingly suggested to me that there was no conscious universal existence in the universe, his response was to accept that people might have different interpretations of their experiences, and then to go on to suggest that that is why there are different ideas and images of God etc. This, of course, totally ignored the point that my experiences were lacking in any God concept at all.

Yes. He seems fine with “faith” as an epistemically useful tool when it serves the notion “god”, but not when it suggest the alternative of “no god”. A bad case of confirmation bias methinks!

All he could add was that this doesn't alter the fact that such influences and patterns do exist in our lives, and yet he ignored the fact that because of their wide range and often contradictory nature(as witnessed, for instance, by my experiences) they cannot, on their own, be trusted to be any sort of a guide as to what reality is in any objective sense. I actually ended by saying that 'The only way to judge such things would be to collate evidence by as an objective a method as possible surely.' but this also seems to have been entirely lost on him.

See above. How he’d get from faith that something is true to demonstrating that it’s true is anyone’s guess, not least because he seems to be awful shy about telling us. He seems to think that there are “subtle forces” or some such for example that “our senses cannot detect”, yet neglects to explain how, if that is the case, he knows they’re there at all rather than just imagined.
 

So, I agree, I don't think that it will register with him at all.

Truly you have the power of foresight!

[ekim]

If you have got time Sriram, read this short story by H.G. Wells...... https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Country_of_the_Blind

[Enki]

What I am saying doesn't register with any of you. Why would you expect anything you say to register with me?!!!   So, learn to discuss without getting annoyed or impatient or angry.

Coming to your point enki. Your experience of no conscious universal existence is nothing new. Check on Theravada Buddhism. It is a common experience.   You should know how to interpret it.

I take it that you think that people who disagree with you are probably  'annoyed or impatient or angry'. You don't seem to be a very good judge of character, do you, as the word 'saddened' would be much more appropriate in my case.? Also, perhaps you might learn to discuss something by actually responding to points made rather than ignoring them. It does help you know in making the discussion constructive.

On the subject of your second paragraph, Sriram, at no point did I say that my experiences were anything new. Indeed, you make my point for me when I referred to the wide range and often contradictory nature of such experiences, positing my experience as an example. As for interpreting it,  I have already suggested what I should and indeed have done, when I said:

The only way to judge such things would be to collate evidence by as an objective a method as possible surely.

So you see, your advice has already been heeded and is therefore redundant. 

[Enki]

If you have got time Sriram, read this short story by H.G. Wells...... https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Country_of_the_Blind

You brought this up before, Ekim, in 2017. Remember?

http://www.religionethics.co.uk/index.php?topic=13324.0

Look down to post 17 onwards. There was plenty of discussion on it then by Sriram, Torri, Stranger, Outrider and others, including myself (see post 53, for instance).

For my money, Bramble's response in post 55, was the most telling. 

[torridon]

You brought this up before, Ekim, in 2017. Remember?

http://www.religionethics.co.uk/index.php?topic=13324.0

Look down to post 17 onwards. There was plenty of discussion on it then by Sriram, Torri, Stranger, Outrider and others, including myself (see post 53, for instance).

For my money, Bramble's response in post 55, was the most telling. 

Thanks for that Enki. I'd second that, a lovely post from Bramble worth re-reading.

[Sriram]

You brought this up before, Ekim, in 2017. Remember?

http://www.religionethics.co.uk/index.php?topic=13324.0

Look down to post 17 onwards. There was plenty of discussion on it then by Sriram, Torri, Stranger, Outrider and others, including myself (see post 53, for instance).

For my money, Bramble's response in post 55, was the most telling. 

My reply no 60 (in the linked thread) is also very relevant to your point in the above thread.

[Sriram]

If you have got time Sriram, read this short story by H.G. Wells...... https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Country_of_the_Blind

Yes...I have read it. Thanks.

That atheists are no different from religious fanatics is obvious from the manner in which they keep repeating their beliefs without  changing their perspective even when radically new information is provided.

[Sriram]

So...coming back....there is now a thrust to understand Consciousness. And chances are that, most of the spiritual philosophies that emphasize consciousness as central to our lives and to the universe, could be vindicated.

Cheers.

Sriram

[Stranger]

That atheists are no different from religious fanatics is obvious from the manner in which they keep repeating their beliefs without  changing their perspective even when radically new information is provided.

You haven't produced any new information or even anything remotely like a coherent argument to consider. As for you accusing others people of repeating stuff in the light of new information... wow, I mean... just wow...

[bluehillside Retd.]

Sriram,

That atheists are no different from religious fanatics is obvious from the manner in which they keep repeating their beliefs without  changing their perspective even when radically new information is provided.

Wrong again.

1. “Atheists” are very different from religious fanatics inasmuch as they/we have logic and reason on their side. 

2. Atheism is the absence of a belief, not a belief.

3. Atheism would change its arguments if ever new information was provided. So far at least, none has been. There are only so many ways to explain that 2+2≠5, no matter how many times the error is repeated.

Oh, and as you’ve just ignored it again should I take it that you now see where you went wrong re your light analogy (ie, that you now do grasp that someone given no good reason to believe something to be true would be right to reject the assertion that it is true, even it if it is true just as a matter of dumb luck)?