I asked for a cite to support your assertion that, “there is a reason for consciousness and there is a reason for the cosmos,” and you post link to a wiki page on the human brain? Why are you playing these kind of games. Can you prove there’s a reason for the universe or can’t you?
Also, Stoid, you have yet to provide the definitions of the words soul and afterlife that you are using, though you have been asked many times to do so. Nor have you deigned to respond to not_alice’s thoughtful dissections of your posts. Why?
Personal insults like “fuck you” are not allowed here. (Making it a link instead of saying it outright doesn’t help.) This is a formal warning, so please don’t do it again.
[quote=“Kozmik, post:410, topic:562876”]
Because there is a reason for consciousness and there is a reason for the cosmos.
Why do you say that?
I don’t know of anything that requires that there be a reason for the cosmos, or consciousness. Do you?
Love your name. I was actually amused at his behavior. Ever watch a kid do something silly and smile? 
Earlier Stoid linked to a paper published in The Lancet on NDEs and suggested it must be valid because The Lancet doesn’t publish junk. I gave an example of them doing just that.
It turns out that the NDE paper also suffers from severe flaws, notably in declaring that patients who have coded and undergo resuscitation have been “brain dead” (wrong) and are characterized by having flat-line EEGs (wrong again).
*"Brain dead, as we saw, is a condition not made at the time of an arrest but a diagnosis that takes time and the patient has to meet multiple criteria before being declared brain dead. They (the patients in the study) were unconscious for a short period of time after a cardiac arrest, and that is not the same as no measurable brain activity or being brain dead.
None, that’s none, zero zilch, nada, zippo, empty set, of these patients in this study were brain dead. If they had been brain dead they would have been organ donors then buried, not interviewed. They were unconscious for mostly short periods of time, a state that, if the same as being brain dead, means many college students are dead Saturday nights."*
For the complete takedown of this poor research paper (plus a heaping helping of deserved derision directed at Deepak Chopra) go here.
It’s clear that besides Stoid, there are a number of people with M.D. and PhD after their names who also have a huge need to believe in the afterlife, and are willing to improperly generalize from flawed and misinterpreted research to support their beliefs. No big surprise there - people with similarly impressive-sounding credentials have jumped on creationist, antivaccination, HIV denialism and climate change denialism bandwagons as well.
We have a good idea of how badly you want to believe in an afterlife. Beyond that, I fear that perfect understanding of your mind is unattainable. 
Hmmm, I’m very interested in what your response to Jackmanii will be, Stoid.
My guess is that there will be fonts.
Why are you asking why? What is what, really? :rolleyes:
Do you really think your questions aren’t worthless? You aren’t being clever, deep or insightful. You are, if anything, making things worse for your case by giving the impression that those who march with Stoid aren’t able to lay out their arguments in a reasoned manner.
Wrong. You don’t know what is physically possible in this universe. You know certain things about physical possibility (the old “hammer and hand” example comes to mind), but neither you nor any other human knows every single thing about the physical possibilities of nature.
Re-quote myself so this isn’t out of context:
No mention of a magical uber-sorcerer in any of my posts on this subject, or implication of magic or sorcery (and none intended). Let’s continue our dissection of your lack of logical response (seriously, this is just making you look bad, and calls into question every one of your statements):
Your, once again misguided, response:
I’m pretty sure I didn’t mention magic in this thread. I am almost positive I never mentioned a magical sorcerer (unless I was joking or picking on a theist).
I’ve mentioned various logically possible scenarios that have not been shown to be physically impossible. In fact, a few of them are not even physically testable, which doesn’t impact on whether or not they are true, including the one which you are making crazy claims about:
“there is always the possibility that what we consider to be the universe is actually the creation of something that is subject to entirely different physical laws.”
No magic, just physical laws. No sorcerer, just a being that has enough understanding of the physical laws of its universe to create our universe. I’d go as far as saying mankind could be heading in this specific direction (barring conservative/theocratic sabotage): being able to create universes with unique laws that man dictates.
Maybe you don’t think that is the direction that man is heading, maybe you don’t think that man will attain such mastery of matter and energy that he will be able to create small universes with civilizations of intelligent conscious beings. I don’t know if we can, but I see no reason that this is not a good place to set the goal posts, so to speak.
So, you should be able to see where I’m coming from. We might be able to eventually create universes which follow laws that we dictate. From this it is easy to infer that something could have already done so- leading to us. Is this testable? Not now. Ultimately? Maybe not. True? Who the fuck knows. Fun to say? Not at all.
End note: *I’d suggest reading up on “logical possibility” vs. “physical possibility”. Maybe take a philosophy course (I don’t know where you are located, nor am I asking, but there may be an amateur philosophy club with guest speakers (hopefully on logic) in your area- if there is, I’d ask one of them to outline “logical vs. physical possibility” to you). *
That was funny. Wish there were more smilies… 
Nothing you’ve mentioned is physically possible. Logical possibilities in this discussion have no application except for how they stem from known physical predicates, and you are absolutely talking about a magic sorceror.
I stick to my assertion.
Some representational tasks in art are simple; different artists might go at it differently but the concept being represented is conveyed with predictable agreement on all sides, and along with that predictable agreement the reasonable conviction that everyone else gets it. This is why we can, in fact, communicate with words: vast portions of what we think are not only shared understandings but also understandings that we expect to find others sharing.
But some other representational tasks are more complicated. In most cases they require building rather intricate thought-structures that have to be encoded into words in order to transfer them, and although some of those words and term phrases may, individually, be of the simple and expected-to-be-shared form, the craft of stringing them together to create the complex composite whole is, at this point, less likely to yield that degree of uniform agreement.
Identifying what “good” means is a viable example. Likewise “justice”, and “freedom”. Political, theological, and philosophical areas of inquiry are rich with concepts that are difficult to get a solid consensus understanding on.
Words do not have meaning except in the sense of “meaning to a subject”. That some (most, in fact) words seem to use to mean the same things to other folks as they mean to each of us when we consider the matter is a very good thing but it doesn’t negate the underlying truth of the observation.
It may be a sprawling work of multi-coloured fontaneity?
I’m not going to continue to address anyone telling me what I believe if it isn’t what I believe, what my position is if it isn’t my position, there’s no point.
I’m also not interested in continuing to debate or discuss anything as long as the ONLY cites you offer are cites that argue with mine…I could offer those, too, and that would be fine, except that no one has offered any cites for their own assertions. Start by showing me where your position comes from, because until you validate yours, tearing down mine is pointless. I’m perfectly aware that there’s all kinds of debate over various details. But your opinions and assertions don’t rise to the level of being considered proof of squat, so I’m done treating them like valid offsets, they aren’t.
My position, which I can state more succinctly thanks to this thread, is that “The mind/body problem” is not considered solved, so stating that it has been is stating a personal opinion, not a fact. Depending on the opinion and what information was used to form it, it may or may not be a reasonable opinion. (i.e. “solved by the bible” not a reasonable opinion. “solved by research which suggests that the brain is the source of consciousness” reasonable opinion.) But it’s still opinion.
That was my initial thought in writing the OP, and it remains my purpose and thought. If you think it’s something else and want to discuss that, it’s on you. If you think it’s this and want to discuss this, but wish to do so by stating in some fashing that it is a fact that the mind/body problem has been solved, I will be happy to discuss it when you show me that that is true. No one has cited anything, so I went and looked up what I was being told was a “fact” over and over again and discovered that it was not a fact, it was at best, a well-reasoned hypothesis. What I discovered is that all kinds of research on consciousness is going on, and that it’s generally agreed that no one has hit on any facts leading to solid conclusions, but that there are lots of interesting ideas floating around.
So, one last time: you tell me you know it’s a fact that the mind/body problem is settled and solved, great! Can’t wait to see something other than your words.
Now I must leave you, for I have been using this as a very effective means of avoiding less entertaining tasks…
I’m thinking about it, but I don’t see how you what say proves your assertion that language is an artform.
Yes, it’s true that so-called abstract concepts seem to slip meaning more easily. But I would still that say the basic meaning of “good” is being of pleasing quality; that that of “justice” is the redress of a wrong; and that that “freedom” is the lack of constraint. When we go beyond those basic meanings we start getting into foxtrots, tangoes, ballet, and, umm, interpretive dance 
– when we get into the rhetorics of politics and law and philosophy and literature, we are entering the arenas where artforms using language have arisen.
Oh, and one last thing: pretty weak finding the name Deepak Chopra as part of a large number of people from all kinds of disciplines and acting like that’s my cite. It’s not, as we all know. The cite was to the research of the doctor and professor emeritus of the anesthesiology department at the U of Arizona, Stuart Hameroff, and his research partner, Sir Roger Penrose, a mathematical physicist:
So attacking Deepak Chopra as though he is my source is completely dishonest.
Yet another reason not to bother with continuing.
Define “artform” 
Consciousness exists because the cosmos exists. The cosmos exists because…
Can you prove there’s a reason for consciousness?
What do you mean by “equating consciousness to consciousness”? What do you mean that “There isn’t anything else”?? What would it mean to equate consciousness to a soul?
You said that the afterlife specifically gets easier standards of evidence because it’s popular.
You said it. No one is lying when they said you made the claim. You are the one pretending that you didn’t.
Why do you keep denying that you said it? Don’t you think a debater with integrity should stand by what they say? All I’m asking is why don’t you withdraw the statement since you’re apparently so ashamed of it?
And having withdrawn the statement, explain why the afterlife needs to be disproved and Spiderman doesn’t.