Excellent! Then you do respect the results of this study, the exact same thing I have been showing on this board for years.
This study echos my posts exactly. Thank you.
You have already said you are not accountable for your statements, so I won’t bother quoting them at you; I will instead ask you how (if at all, which I doubt) this theory of cognition I present differs from your beliefs. Not that it matters; my arguements apply to every belief system that includes the beleif that the human mind is housed in a nonphysical soul.
Unless you are denying that the physical world is at all distinguishible from the physical (which would be the same as saying there is no spiritual world), then if the mind is in the spiritual world and the eyes/fingertips in the physical, then there must be some point between your mind and your eyes/fingertips where the information being transmitted one way or the other ‘jumps’ from the physical world to the spiritual one. External chemicals and their effects naturally cannot make this jump, so any visible effects of chemicals such as beer or cocaine on the mind (which, if we have spirits at all, must be behind this ‘jump’) must be explained via other methods, ones that apply in the spirit world.
The primitive ‘evil spirits’ theory that you did reference is just such a explanation. However, as I mentioned, it doesn’t hold water in the modern world. You will need to either 1) find another, better explanation, 2) abandon the belief that our minds are not contained in our physical brains, or 3) stick your fingers in your ears, close your eyes, and shout “la la la” at the top of your lungs to drown out conscious thought. I leave it to you to choose the method you prefer.
I repeat: it doesn’t matter WHAT your theory of spirits is, in precise detail; it is still subject to this problem. It doesn’t matter whether my “assumptions” are wrong; it’s a fundamental issue with making the mind disjoint with the body. So don’t try to push this back and say it’s my error: your beliefs; your problem.
As for “denying spirit = intelligence”, that’s not what’s going on here. What’s going on here is “refusing to think = not intelligence.” I presented a fundamental problem with the beliefs you present; if you refuse to think about it, then it’s no surprise that I might seem intelligent to you by comparison.
There are actually a number of very intelligent theists on this board (I think you’ve argued with some of them) and I presume they beleive in the spirit too. I’m not sure how precisely they reconcile this with modern knowledge, but I’m sure it’s better than “evil spirits possess me when I drink.”
Also, the evidence to the contrary WAS THE VERY POST YOU REPLIED TO. I presented it. I also summarized it again in this post. If you managed not to see it, perhaps you should try looking again, this time with your eyes open.
That’s where Jane Roberts (and Seth) lived.
I need you to clarify your “evidence to the contrary” without all the embellishment, I am not sure I understand just what it is.
I will say the method used to interface and emote the body is thought. Just as it is thought that you use to control your body.
Oh! Thank you for the explanation. I read all the books, but I never visited her/him.
Take three.
A) Liquor, marijuana, and various other mood-altering drugs are all chemical, and physical in nature. So, any effect they have is on the body; they have no effect on souls or spirits, which are not physical. Correct?
B) You believe that a person’s mood, that is their emotions and emotional state, are housed in the spirit, and not the body. Correct?
C) Liquor, marijuana, and various other mood-altering drugs do not have the same effects on people as each other; each has its own type of effect, that (while it may vary somewhat from person to person) is nonetheless distinct and even somewhat recognizeable. Correct?
If A and B are true, then C becomes problematic for a “the effects of drugs are caused by partial possession by evil spirits” theory. The problem is that the physical drug is dictating the behavior of the supposed demon. I can’t think of any good reason why, if all that’s happening is that demons are taking over, that the demons choose to act in the specific manner we expect from the drug. Can you?
The problem applies even if no evil spirits are involved. Why should any spirit being, be it an invading demon or be it your own soul, adjust your moods and behavior in the specific manner that the drug prescribes? The physical drug has no control over spiritual behavior. So why don’t drunks act like stoners?
The transmission is two-way, your spirit receives feedback from the body, and since most people intensely identify with their bodies, that is your spirit believes it is the body, so your spirit believes in drunkeness and the power of chemicals also.
How would your spirit even know how to act? If your body doesn’t have moods, thoughts, and feelings of its own (and if it does then consciousness can be observed, and the spirit is redundant) then the body cannot be a sad drunk, and the spirit would have nothing to imitate, and so wouldn’t be a sad drunk either.
I don’t know how else to explain it – you believe you are your body so whatever happens to the body happens to you and you react with emotions, etc.
Some people identify with their favorite ball team, they are happy when the team wins and sad when it loses. If the team is penalized they get angry they act like they are the team. “We won, the bastards cheated us,” and so on. Some people are so depressed by “their team” losing they commit suicide.
You believe you are your body, everything that happens to that body happens to you. The body don’t get angry, you do, the body don’t get sad, you do. There is no consciousness in the body and when you leave the body it dies, you don’t need it any longer to walk around in the physical. People can no longer see or hear you, but you are still here, until you go to the light.
More.
If you drink alcohol, the body is poisoned and you react by getting drunk, same with drugs, afterall, if you were not in the body it would not react at all, it couldn’t it would be dead.
When you are bipolar and you take medicines to level your mood swings, your body notes that it has been poisoned, the spirit notes that the body has been poisoned, and…it levels the mood swings? How would it know the effect the drug was supposed to have on the brain, if the emotions of the brain are not present in the active electrochemical state of the brain, for the drug to manipulate?
Again, you’re running into the problem that, for the drugs to have their specific effect upon the mind, there has to be a physical mind there for the physical chemicals to get physical on. Just saying “The body is effected by the drugs, and is poisoned, and the spirit reacts to the poisoning” is attempting to pretend the situation is as simple as alcohol and demons again. Sorry, no, there’s lots of different specific effects that drugs can have on the mind, and reducing everything to ‘body poisoned - spirit fakes a placebo effect’ presents a scenario that does not allow for the different per-drug reactions that can be observed. The drugs could not tell the body what they were going to do to the emotions if the emotions were not encoded into the body somehow.
Ignoring this is like taking the baseball analogy, and reducing the information given to the avid baseball fans to “something happened to your team, but we’re not saying what”. They wouldn’t know whether to be happy or sad or whatever. Just like the spirit wouldn’t know how to react to a specific drug.
You keep saying there is no evidence of the mind in the brain, but in fact, you’re just dismissing it all, or presenting needlessly complex alternative explanations for how it only looks like the mind is in the brain. There isn’t any kind of evidence for which you couldn’t cook up an ad-hoc explanation using your own point of view. So your complaint that there isn’t any evidence is in fact quite dishonest.
I think it’s a measure of the complexity of the system. Kidneys are relatively simple, massive neural networks are not. In fact, did you know that it’s possible to create an artificial neural network that will adapt to function in a way that is very difficult to analyse?
I can’t really give you what you want, I am not knowledgeable enough to know specifically how everything works. I know the you(spirit) controls the body there is nothing else that does, because when you leave your body dies. As for the different effects of different pills, even the companies that make them aren’t sure how most of them work or why. We have good evidence of non-local consciousness. Good research evidence, and I have experienced being out of my body so I know the difference between me and my body. You will just have to believe what seems right to you.
I am not dishonest, there is no physical evidence of a consciousness residing in the brain. There are plenty of theories of this and that, but no real evidence. We do have real evidence of consciousness being separate from the brain. People just have to believe what they feel.
People have given you evidence again and again. You’ve brought up the nonsensical notion of weighing the mind once more. I give up - you aren’t even trying to understand what people are telling you anymore. (If you ever did.)
I have been studying the human condition all my life and have found no evidence that the mind is contained in the body. But if you do have evidence, and not just theories, I would love to hear about it. Learning is my nature.
I don’t think we know the answer.
The old explanation is that it is the soul - a magical (“spiritual”) thing that lives in the body. The ghost in the machine. It satisfies the sense we have (some of us have) that we’re something different from - more than - just cells, or meat, or electrical activity.
But there’s no scientific evidence for the soul, and more importantly, it raises the questions that have already been asked - if we’re souls, and not brains, what’s the connection between the brain, and the soul? How does the soul know to feel drunk when the body drinks?
Some scientists say we are, in fact, just brains. Or just electrical activity inside of brains. But that explanation (to me, at least) is not satisfying either.
One can observe (I suppose) electrical activity that corresponds to “hot” or to “smooth” or to “sexy.” But is that electrical activity - that pattern of brain waves - is it “hotness,” or “smoothness”?
Some people say we’re like computers, running programs. But computers don’t feel hot, or sexy. They may react, they may run diagnostics, but they don’t know they’re doing it. If we are just programs, why are we aware of what we’re doing?
Other people say consciousness is just an illusion. But who, or what, is being deluded? Doesn’t just saying it imply that consciousness must exist, in order to be deluded?
I think the OP’s question is a very good question, and I don’t know the answer to it. But I don’t think that “the soul” answers the question, and neither does “electrical activity,” or references to computers.
Lekatt, in which post in this thread did you present scientific evidence that the mind is non-local and not contained in the brain? (Sorry, I haven’t been following the thread.)
-FrL-
I think that we all feel that way. It’s just that some fully embrace the idea that feelings do not come close to serving as evidence, nor does “spirit” have any explanatory power as to how it works (“magic” being useless as an explanation). Note that I’m not rejecting “spirit” out of hand; rather, I’m simply saying it’s unsupported and doesn’t provide any understanding of the phenomenon.
Since I said this, I feel the obligation to clarify. As soon as you ask the question “who, or what, is being deluded?” you make the mistake of reifying consciousness (that is, treat an abstract as a concrete object).
Note that while the claim of “illusion” does not contradict “electrical activity” (a mechanism) or “similarity to a computer” (an analogy, i.e., another, comparable, abstraction), it does preclude “spirit”.
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