Relevant to your discussion, I know I’ve read in a couple of pop-sci magazines recently that at least some neurophysicists claim that imagination and memory are practically indistinguishable at the neural level as far as we can presently measure. The theory is that they are very nearly the same activity, distinguished more by the attitude a person takes toward the activity* rather than the activity itself.
-FrL-
*Of course taking an attitude is an activity in itself.
As I understand it, the visual part is already pre-mapped, as it were; the image of what you see/imagine appears as an only somewhat distorted pattern on the surface of the visual cortex. They just can’t get a really detailed look at it yet; especially without doing something too extreme for use on humans, like replacing part of the skull with glass ( done with monkeys ). And as said; dreams, memories and imagination all seem to fire the same neurons.
That, and perception of the outside world it typically more detailed.
There appears to be a “switch” in the brain that tells the rest of the brain that something is “real” or “unreal”. And as I understand it, what makes hallucinations so powerful isn’t the realism - they can be pretty crude - but whether or not the drug or whatever causing the hallucination manages to flip the “It’s real !” switch. Quite a few people apparently have hallucinations but function just fine because for whatever reason the switch never flips; I recall one guy quoted as saying he just considers things like the appearance of disembodied talking heads “free entertainment”; he never thinks they are real.
I think the OP’s teleportation is only further confusing the matter. I see what point he’s trying to make with it, however, I think it’s insufficient.
Being agnostic, I can see an argument for a soul existing. If we can all agree that our consciousness is greater than the sum of its physical parts, I think the difference there would be our “soul.” I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s necessarily metaphysical, but it is certainly elusive and abstract.
Think about this. Why am I me, and you, you? What is it that keeps my awareness, my mind, me, tied to this body? After giving it some thought, you start to see another way of looking at it. It’s not that your awareness is separate from your body, like water residing in a vessel, it’s more like your awareness is a complex pattern your body makes, like a bow being run over a violin.
The weird part is how recursive self-awareness is. You can think about thinking what you’re thinking about. What else can do that? You can think about the very device (your brain) that is creating your thoughts. There’s something very special about that. And I can see how it can lead to the conclusion we must have a soul. Our self-awareness feels immortal. I will always feel like me. I feel like I could continue to exist without my body if it were possible. Of course, we know lucidness can degrade from a number of brain diseases and traumas. But we can’t really say the worst of those cases aren’t self-aware on some level. It is something to be them.
Self-awareness is the universe’s way of appreciating itself. God or no God, something exists, rather than nothing. That’s what keeps me awake at night. Therefore, I find the idea of a God just as unlikely as anything even existing at all. Yet, here we are.
All that said, we can’t define what a creator of the universe might be like, nor can we define what a soul/spirit would be. They’re vague concepts we conjure to comfort ourselves with the fact that we are here, we are awake, and we will one day cease to exist. If there really is some other level to existence than just what we can see and measure, then God sure did go out of his way to make it look like he didn’t exist… self-awareness notwithstanding.
And there’s no way in hell you’re gonna get me to go through that teleporter.
Actually, I think you have it backwards. The universe, at its quantum root, appears to be nothing more than an abstract mathematical construct, or as some have put it, a probability distribution. “The atoms or the elementary particles are not real; they form a world of potentialities and possibilities rather than one of things or facts.” — Werner Heisenberg
I was just attempting to approach what I thought you were saying you had a problem with, i.e., a definition or description of the spirit. I just thought it was reasonable to look at certain aspects of a physical world and draw from them certain conclusions about a metaphysical world. I’m not married to any particular approach or method, but as I said, it is at least a place to start. If you have something better, I’m open to hearing it. But just giving up because nothing comes to mind immediately or because it might be difficult doesn’t seem like a Dope thing to do.
Yes.
That doesn’t make any sense to me. I mean, I understand your metaphor and in fact quite like it. But I don’t understand why it implies the absence of a metaworld in which the river flows. Indeed, the fact that you are processional rather than static implies, to me, that there is some kind of gestalt with respect to your individuation. That is, you are more than the sum of your parts. Using your own metaphors, it is at least as reasonable to assume that the difference between you and your parts-sum is metaphysical as it is to assume otherwise.
I think that’s the point. The point is that we cannot know, at least through science because science studies only things that are observable. It is no less reasonable to draw a conclusion that the thing in question is external than to draw the opposite. Consider the neutral conclusion drawn by a celebrated neurological surgeon and researcher who has conducted extensive experiments in the field:
Why is the revealed truth of such transcendent experiences in any way “inferior” to the more mundane truths that we scientists dabble in? Indeed, if you are tempted to jump to this conclusion, just bear in mind that one could use exactly the same evidence – the involvement of the temporal lobes in religion – to argue for, rather than against, the existence of God. — VS Ramachandran, Phantoms in the Brain, pp 184-185
You seem to have missed the point so far afield that I’m not sure how to bring you back to it. If you think this discussion is about either you or me personally, then there’s no point in having it here. That’s what telephones and doorbells are for.
Am I to assume that we’re using the terms “soul” and “spirit” as synonyms? I’m a little disturbed — and I really mean just a little, because I know your intellectual largess — that you want definitions pinned down and yet are continuing the discussing using terms that you find lacking in meaning. It seems to me that we cannot even know whether “detection” is itself an applicable term until we know what we’re talking about.
People are using expressions like “back to the OP…” as though pausing to define our terms is somehow off-topic or irrelevant. But not everything is detectable scientifically. You cannot detect, for example, any particular future event even though you have every confidence that future events will occur. You cannot detect a particular future event because it does not exist yet in the sense that you would say other things exist. But that is merely a temporal restriction and not a metaphysical one. In fact, a perhaps infinite number of “future events” have already occurred since the time you read the previous sentence. They didn’t exist then but they do now. Is now less valid than then? Is what you cannot detect less valid than what you can?
Voyager, one more thing. The point I made in my last paragraph to you above does not exempt particular future events that are known with a certainty. There are certain physical laws that dictate what will happen if you do X. Even so, even though you can predict them with an almost absolute certainty, you still cannot detect them until after they occur. And so you would not ask, for example, “How do I detect the equal and opposite reaction before I hit this ball?” That’s because it is an analytical matter that follows from laws used as premises. Potential exists even if you cannot detect it.
:rolleyes: Scientists are interested in the contents of dreams in general, not the contents of your dream. They don’t care that you dreamed of a house unless they are specifically studying your dreams and trying to correlate them. Your dreams don’t matter, until they do.
Your whole point in this was that we can’t scientifically prove that you dreamed of a house. And my point, which have totally ignored the entire time was that it didn’t matter, we don’t need scientific proof of your dreams.
Oh, and speaking of things you’ve ignored you seemed to have missed the question yet again, can’t imagine how. You said:
and then I said:
so if you could just go ahead and answer that that would be great.
Noooooo!
Would Matthew Wilson, the Sherman Fairchild Professor of Neuroscience for MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, qualify as a scientist? Along with other distinguished peers in his field, he is working with an extension of positron emission tomography, called functional magnetic resonance imaging, in an effort to achieve exactly what you say he isn’t interested in. In fact, Alan Siegel, who is an assistant clinical professor at UCB’s Department of Psychology along with chairing continuing education for the Association for the Study of Dreams, is also a scientist. He calls what you say he isn’t interest in the “holy grail” of dream research, declaring “My vision of the future is that you could holographically project dreams.” And in the September 15, 1999, issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, findings were published concerning an experiment in which the mental images in cat brains were primatively reproduced in a way that was “recognizably like” scenes they were viewing. What the many scientists studying specific dream content seem least interested in, as far as I can tell, is your opinion of what might interest them.
With all due respect, discussion of that topic would consume its own thread — or even many of them, as a search by you would reveal — and would require a level of intellectual maturity that I find lacking in some of your speculative assertions.
The universe doesn’t care one whit about self-awareness.
Brains are organs for predicting the future. They take information about the world, construct a crude simulation, run it forward a bit, and use that prediction to drive behavior. At the lowest level this means something as basic as snapping your jaws at where a flying insect will be in half a second, instead of where it is right now. But as animals become more complicated and their behaviors become more intricate, the predictive powers of the brain necessarily need to increase.
If you live in pack with other animals your reproductive success often depends upon your ability to predict the behavior of your packmates. That way you can coordinate your actions during a hunt, or convince a highly desirable female to mate with you. So you wind up with a brain that is wired to run crude simulations of the other brains you interact with on a daily basis. And since those brains are running simulations of *your *brain and factoring that information into *their *behavioral choices, your simulation needs to include a second-order crude version of itself.
Do you see where I’m going with this?
Self-awareness is a natural adaptation that arose from our origins as pack-based preditors. Other animals have it to lesser degrees – we’re just particularly good at it.
So, you just ignore what people type and substitute their half of the discussion with your own stuff? I did not say that scientists are not interested in dreams. In fact if you bother to read the line you quoted you’ll this particular arrangement of characters:
Yes, scientists are researching dreams, yes they are interested in the contents of dreams. But unless it’s your head in the positron emission tomographer, scientists are not interested in your house dream. Once again I feel compelled to repeat that we do not scientific evidence of your dream for it to be real.
With all due respect, given the level of comprehension, ability to follow a discussion, and sheer unremitting quality of logical thought process you have displayed here, I seriously doubt another discussion in this area would be worth the time and effort for any of us.
The OP seems to be using them synonymously. He’s using spirit as something associated with a body, which a godlike spirit wouldn’t be.
A lot of this discussion has been trying to help the OP define his terms. if we define “spirit” as the state of the universe, then it exists. If we define it as something like a soul, then its existence is questionable.
And indeed not everything is detectable scientifically, and you don’t even have to include time. Heisenberg showed that the vector <position,momentum> of a particle is not detectable scientifically.
As for what you said above about probability distributions, while it is true that at the micro-level it is all probability, at the macro level the distribution collapses to near certainty. This isn’t just for quantum effects - the movement of gas molecules is probabilistic, but you still have gas laws which aren’t,. really. This seems to be a fundamental characteristic of the universe which doesn’t get discussed much.
I was taking it as a given that a river has no metaphysical existence. A river is really nothing more than a process of water flowing down a slowly changing path. We only see it as a static entity because it changes slowly to us. The same thing applies to humans - except that the subject also has memories. I’m not at all convinced that this implies we have any real metaphysical existence except in our heads and the heads of the people who know us - in more or less the same way that characters in a book don’t have a metaphysical existense.
They are the same individual or not the same individual in pretty much the same sense that a person is or is not the same person on Tuesday as they were on Friday.
They are part of the same person-space-time-worm-entity, but they are not the same person-slice.
Any discussion (or so-called “proof”) regarding the existence of souls is meaningless if you confine your discourse to SpaceTime. We humans only perceive four dimensions, but mainstream science has theorized there are actually 11 dimensions (aka M-Theory) – seven of which cannot be penetrated by human observation. And these are only the dimensions science has theorized thus far; it’s likely there are many, many more.
It’s equally conceited to assume that our four observable dimensions (three spacial dimensions + Time) are the most important dimensions that exist. If souls & spirits exist, it’s likely they exist mainly in one of these extra dimensions, and these dimensions have a grand scale which might extend far beyond any concept of our own observable SpaceTime – from the point of view of a spirit or soul, our SpaceTime dimension(s) could appear to them as simple and trivial as human beings observing an ant farm.
I don’t exactly believe in the soul, but I do believe in spirit-based entities (angels, ghosts, daemons, etc.) and I equally believe that the human brain harnesses & creates spiritual energy as part of its basic, underlying function. I also believe in an afterlife, based on direct observation – therefore, I must accept the existence of souls by proxy.
I love it when lack of evidence is seen as the most compelling proof of all.
Sigh. You are misinterpreting parts of string theory. If the extra dimensions exist, they are far from grand, but are folded up at the quantum level. Plus, nothing would exist on one dimension only. Do you exist in just width? That is basically what you are saying.
True.
False.
Perhaps you meant to say, they are far from grand from our perspective. We cannot peer into these alternate dimensions – hell, we only know they exist via mathematical formulas – but if those dimensions contained their own indigenous inhabitants (linked via our SpaceTime dimension by electromagnetism or some undetected 5th-dimensional force) they would view their own dimension as we view ours – infinite and grand.
Singularities (i.e. black holes) have no dimension at all, yet they exist.
Remember, the fundamental axiom of quantum mechanics is: “Everything that can possibly exist, does.”
You miss my point. The universe could very well have come into existance and never given rise to life, let alone self-awareness. Without SA, there would be no one around to even rocognize its exisistance, let alone ourselves.
It’s very recursive and weird, and I was only trying to be colorful with the phrase you quoted as I don’t really think the universe on the whole has any agenda. But we are a result of the universe coming into existance, and therefore give it a “conciousness,” for lack of better analogy.
Please read The Elegant Universe. Physics has come a long way from Ray Cummings and** The Girl in the Golden Atom.**
So spirits have no interaction with the rest of the universe. Gotcha.
Is that somewhere in that video? I can’t watch it at work, but I’m sure you are taking his comment out of context. Since our universe is finite, this can’t be true.
For instance, it is possible that every sperm of your father existing during periods your mother was fertile could have produced offspring. Does every version of you exist somewhere? If he was talking about the many universes hypothesis, none of these versions could interact, so it is interesting but immaterial if a universe exists with them in it.