Followers of the Worm God also pray for large things to die.
You keep talking about God as though it’s something outside yourself. What if it’s not? What if it IS yourself? I’m not saying that makes you omnipotent or telekinetic. It just makes you alive. That if that same sense of awareness that is you is the same sense of awareness that is me? What if we are all part of the same vast sense of awareness, even though we think we are separate? Kind of puts life (and God) in a different light.
My point being, "I don’t “wonder what it is within me that’s able to communicate with what it is inside other people” because I know what it is–a bunch of organic circuits that have evolved and been refined over hundreds of millions of years. I don’t know the fine details of how it works (just like I don’t know the fine details of how the circuitry of my cell phone works) but I’m confident that it isn’t magic, isn’t “The Force”, and there is no homunculus sitting up there. It is all machine, no ghost.
So, the Matrix then. (Script version, not film version.) Some super-intelligence has tapped into the circuitry of our brains to parasitically run part of itself on my mental hardware. None of the people in the pods are aware of these connections - they don’t get telepathy from it. It’s not about them. It’s about creating a massive networked computer to run the “God” intelligence on.
Sounds legit. Who doesn’t feel like they’re in a slime-filled pod now and then?
The thing is, I have a general idea of how brains work. They’re physical entities. They occupy physical space and they react poorly to being bashed to bits by a lead pipe. The minds within them react poorly to the brains being bashed to bits by a lead pipe. This is because the best analogy you’ve ever seen for how your brain works is the computer you’re reading this post on.
Yes your computer is sentient. Also it hates you.
The thing about brains is they don’t require magic to run - and that’s a good thing. Brains, and minds, are real. However the bad thing about brains is they don’t have magic powers - including the capability to connect telepathically to other people. The physical hardware for that isn’t there, and despite numerous efforts to claim otherwise, there’s no sign that brains have wireless capabilities either. Plus I can’t levitate cars with my mind which is just adding insult to injury.
But let it not be said I don’t have imagination. I can imagine that rather than being computers, our brains are dummy terminals - computers that don’t do much beyond dialing into another computer and letting that computer tell them what to say and do. (Like your browser is asking another computer how to show you this web page.) When you bash in a dummy terminal with a lead pipe, you can log into a different terminal and everything will still be there - reincarnation, baby!
Unfortunately there’s evidence against that - people have had their minds modified via application of lead pipes, which doesn’t happen with dummy terminals. Plus we’ve looked around inside peoples’ brains and haven’t found a wireless network card. Still though, I can imagine it.
But I don’t see the appeal. As you say, we think we’re separate, and even if our minds are all running side-by-side on the same network server, it doesn’t effect our interaction with reality or each other at all. No telepathy. No car-tossing. No fun. No point.
I’ll just stick with reality. Everybody has one brain, and it runs until it stops. So install fun apps and have a blast while it lasts.
I take it there’s not a lot of magic or mysticism in your life.
Absolutely none whatsoever, and damn proud of it.
I enjoy the creativity you put into this response. The fact that I can appreciate your humour and wit indicates there’s already something inside me that can recognize that humour that came from within you. Common language? That’s part of it. But I think there’s more to it.
When I look at my hand, I call it “my hand.” I don’t call it “me.” Same with my eye, my nose, my face, heck, even my brain and my mind. I talk about those things as though they are separate from me, instead of just saying “me.” As though my consciousness resides somewhere else. So who is this me within me? Who is this “I” that experiences my hand, my brain, my mind? It’s a peculiarity of language, and I don’t know if I’m expressing this very well, but I have a hunch that this point of view experience of life that I have is exactly what God is—the ghost in the machine. And to keep it even more interesting, it’s the same consciousness that’s in you, even if we are unaware of it, and the same consciousness in everyone, even animals, plants and inanimate things. Call it empathy if you want. That’s what I think God is.
I’ll be here all week. Try the veal.
If there was more to it than that, you wouldn’t have to have bothered reading my post - my wit would have reached out to you across the miles between us before you so much as refreshed the browser.
The phrase “ghost in the machine” was coined by the philosopher Gilbert Ryle, talking about Descartes’s concept of mind-body dualism. You are far from the first person to notice that when we crack open somebody’s head we don’t find a person in there, just squishy brain mush, and wonder where all the thinking comes form.
In using the term Ryle was mocking the idea that humans are bodies ‘haunted’ by a controlling spirit. Quite deliberately trying to make it sound stupid. Just thought that should be mentioned.
And regarding where your “you” actually is, it’s a computer program running on the hardware called your brain. This is why you only see the things your eyes (which are physically hooked to your brain) see, hear the things your ears (which are physically hooked to your brain) hear, and so on - the brain receives the inputs and your mind, running on the brain, interprets them. Fairly straightforward, really.
Of course, my brain isn’t physically hooked to your brain, or that of animals, plants, or cars that stubbornly refuse to levitate when I think at them. So yeah.
Er, I didn’t catch the joke. Maybe your telepathy failed to deliver it?
If you tell a really funny joke to an auditorium full of people and nobody laughs, does that mean the joke wasn’t actually funny?
Seems the communication takes place somewhere between the sender’s brain and the receiver’s brain, and it would seem a lot of it is in the delivery. I’m not by the way suggesting telepathy is even possible—maybe it is, maybe not—but every time we connect as people through language, like on this forum, we share a bit of ourselves. What’s the expression? Namaste. The spirit in me recognizes the spirit in you. And yes, it would be very cool to levitate cars. But maybe, say, only certain brands of cars, like KIAs. The power would be useless on Toyotas.
Eusocial insects do not have a “hive mind”. They respond to events and act in coördinated ways based on pheromones and other signals, but the hive queen is merely the progenitor: all she does is lay eggs and have her needs tended to. As an analogy to some “universal mind”, it does not work, and there is no reason whatsoever to imagine that there is some mystical interconnectedness, that we might be sharing our intelligence or being managed by some kind of Gaianesque entity (or whatever).
Which is not to say that some sort of such a mechanism could not exist. The universe seems to be comprised of one or several substrates that carry the fields and waves that propagate throughout spacetime. There are not a few things we do not understand. But there has not been any consistent evidence to support paranormality, just some localized strangeness here and there, so we mostly discount the idea.
Yes, but that setup was destroyed by the Vogons to make way for a hyperspace bypass. It was a Thursday.
“You keep talking about peace as if it involves large groups of people not shooting each other with guns. What if it’s not?”
This is what happens when you take terms with tons of baggage and use them in totally non-standard ways without defining them clearly. People get confused, talk past each other, and the whole conversation gets muddled.
This song should never be relevant. Stop making this song relevant.
I think you’re just bad at language, honestly.
When I say “me”, it’s a very non-specific, vague response. If a doctor asks you, “What hurts” and you say, “me”, that gives the doctor no information to work with - they already know that you’re in pain, but they need to specify where. Hence why it is a very useful linguistic shorthand to be able to say things like “my hand” or “my leg” or even odd things like “my mind” (when in fact “you” are nothing but a mind) when talking about things like depression or bipolar.
They’re separate linguistic handles*. “My hand” means something different than “me”. It’s a pointer that points to something different, in the same way that “my hand” and “my finger” point to different things, even though one is contained in the other, or the same way “even numbers” and “all numbers” point to different things, even though “all numbers” contains “even numbers”. But it being useful and commonplace to talk about them as separate entities does not suddenly make them distinct.
*Note: this might be me being bad at language, there’s probably a technical term I’m mangling here.
The funny thing about this is, we already have another term to describe made-up nonsense like this - it’s called a “soul”. For the record, I don’t believe in those either.
(Bolding mine)
:smack::smack::smack:
A rock does not have consciousness!
Ohhh so this is a standup set, and not an actual description of a worldview. That makes so much more sense! It’s not a funny set, but at least it’s not incredibly depressing.
It’s Woo all the way down with you, isn’t it?
At this point I find it hard to believe you’re debating in good faith. Your arguments seems more like gainsaying in opposition to challenge of an ill considered and unsupported belief system. I suppose it must be embarrassing to admit at this point that you’ve fabricated this entire Life=God thing because it seemed like a good idea at the time. By now though, you must be wondering if this is the right hill to die on, rhetorically speaking.
Believe in magic!.. you muggle.
Well, as I explained in the opening post, it comes from something Neale Donald Walsch wrote, not me. I like the word view and J think it has merit. Nothing to be embarrassed about at all.
You’re the one spending all this time trying to twist the meanings of common words in a desperate attempt to make it true in some way, shape or form.
Between this thread and the thread about water coming before the sun I can’t tell which I find more fun.
All I get out of this is you defining “god” as the property shared by all existing things - the essence of existence. Since things exist there must be a god which gives them the property of existence.
Sounds a lot like the Ontological argument for god.
Fair enough; you believe what you believe because you believe it.
At most, there’s internal consistency in that position.
If there was no stuff, would that mean there was no god? What good is a god without stuff? And by that logic, did stuff itself create god, since it would not have existed before there was stuff?
What does god need with stuff?
They’ve run out of places to hide their gods, so now they claim their gods are disguised as emotions and/or states of being. I can’t wait for the next volume of Where’s [del]Waldo[/del]God?.