Unless you’re simply stating the tautology that an experience with a spirit is an experience with a spirit, this is absurd. Spiritual experiences certainly exist, but the causes of those experiences can be described in perfectly naturalistic terms. Of course, as that Ramachandran quote illustrates, you could interpret the neuro-chemical mechanisms which produce them as material expressions of the divine. And maybe that’s true. However, there is currently, and probably never will be, a sufficient reason for believing this. The materialist has, at the very least, the more ontologically parsimonious theory.
(By the way, Liberal, I think you would benefit from Thomas Metzinger’s Being No One: The Self-Model of Subjectivity. Among other things, it presents a materialist account of our inability to intuitively believe in materialism (and therefore why we are led, almost by necessity, to think we need something like ‘spirit’ to explain phenomenal consciousness) as well as interesting analyses of all sorts of “spiritual” and simply bizarre mental experiences. Here’s the precis (PDF): PSYCHE: Being No One)
Liberal, what exactly do you mean when you use the phrase “vector of a particle”? It’s been a while, but I have done some quantum mechanics work in college more than 25 years ago, and I’m not at all sure about what you’re asking for. Its position? Velocity? Momentum? Acceleration? All of these are vector quantities, and any of the three can be measured with high precision.
Similarly, I’m baffled by your use of “potential of a particle.” What is that? The only potential I know of that could be related to QM is electric potential, but a particle can’t have electric potential. So what are you talking about? The Heisenberg quote uses the word “potentialities” in a non-technical sense, just like he also used the word “possibilities.” But no one asks what the “possibility of a particle” is - that makes no sense.
No, I’m not. Heisenberg called the relations he posited between position and momentum “Unbestimmtheitsrelationen”, or 'indeterminacy relations". It was Eddington who first dubbed the inequality as an “uncertainty principle”. There is, in fact, an open epistemological question as to whether it is a principle at all.
Let us set aside the fact that VS Ramachandran is one of the most accomplished and credentialed neurological researchers in the world, which anyone can confirm simply by plugging his name into a Google search.
More shocking than the nearly boundless ignorance of your comment, however, is the sheer audacity of its puniness. It isn’t just ignorant; it is willfully ignorant. Deliberately ignorant. It is an ignorance born of laziness and closed-mindedness. It betrays a mentality that does not even have the energy to research a man before dismissing him as “some professor”. It draws conclusions about, of all things, his religious faith with absolutely zero knowledge of him as a basis from which to draw.
I am of two minds in having these sorts of discussions with you. On the one hand, it is exhausting, frankly, to constantly provide you with substantial, corroborated evidence that you predictably reject without so much as the firing of a single frontal lobe neuron. But on the other hand, it is satisfying to have your comments chiseled in cyberstone for all the world to see. And that is, honestly, how I approach discussions with you. I’m not even talking to you, but rather to people who are reading your uncited, random garbage and wondering whether you will get away with just declaring truth and reality into existence or nonexistence.
At this point, I would be satisfied if you would produce a link to anything resembling a credible source. But it is clear that research does not matter to you; otherwise, you would know by now that Ramachandran is so prestigious in his field that, not only are his own credentials singularly impressive, but his peers hold him in such high esteem that his name features prominently in the curriculum vitae of any who have had the distinct honor of working with him in any capacity.
You are so used to cranking out meaningless babble and rhetorical spittle that you expect others to operate in the same way, perhaps. But Ramachandran’s data points — and we can clearly assume that you are unfamiliar with any of them — are specifically about deity, and not other phenomena.
More whackjob nonsense. I have, in fact, demanded the exact opposite of what you say. I’ve done so repeatedly, and do so now so that you might have the opportunity to ignore it or fail to comprehend it yet again. I do not ask science to prove or disprove anything whatsoever with respect to God. Science is an empirical epistemology. It is the perfect tool for testing the physical world, but a completely worthless tool for examining analytical questions.
I don’t know what you’re having there — a monologue perhaps.
Since when are dictionary definitions governed by the laws of physics?
That comment is so monumentally stupid that it is best left to stew in its own massive intellectual pot of boiling rhetorical vomit. You have achieved the remarkable goal of not only making no sense, but destroying your own argument in the process. Your conclusions are so profoundly entrenched in your premises that you cannot bare to admit a simple thing that everybody knows: namely, that natural selection is a mechanism that facilitates evolution and that asking for its mass is nonsense.
We have a name for arguments of that form. We call them “fallacies”. What kind it is, I leave for you to research, which I have every confidence you will do in your righteous quest for intellectual growth. (We also have a name for that remark. It rhymes with “sarcasm”.)
Jesus! God! Holy fucking cow! Even these interjections fail to express the magnitude of shock from yet another of your brain-slapping non sequiturs.
“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
Correction: past particle vectors can and have been measured; i.e., ones that no longer exist. Or as Heisenberg put it, indeterminacy “does not hold for the past.” — Chicago lecture, 1930.
Your recollection is of no importance, and frankly of no comfort. It is too much filtered as it climbs out of the black hole of ignorance where it has wallowed for God knows how long. I tried to find your source for you, and am resigned to the fact that it does not exist. Penning traps are used for helping to calculate the masses of certain neutron rich nuclei and heavy isotopes, as well as conducting other tests of the standard model. I can find nothing that corroborates your claim. In all probability, neither can you.
By the way, I hate what you do. Not that that matters to you, but still. You’ve been playing a prolonged game of Twister with the facts and data of science for most of your tenure here. The hopelessly senile quasi-arguments that you make are exactly what inspired an exasperated Daniel Dennet to declare, “There’s nothing I like less than bad arguments for a view that I hold dear.” He is an atheist. I suggest you actually research him before making a fool of yourself by dismissing him as some sort of spy or henchman for religion.
You never cite any claim. You dismiss all cited claims. The only difference between your arguments and the arguments of a creationist crackpot is that the creationist will typically have oodles of links saved in his bookmarks. If he were here making claims in your fashion, he would already have been bullied out of the forum. And rightly so. What will impress me as much as anything said by those who disagree with me is that they also disagree with you.
That’s rather the point. All science can see is the interaction; it cannot see the agency. Nor is it supossed or expected to. I don’t mind if a person interprets these results in the context of his materialist or physicalist views. What I mind is if a person declares that no other interpretation is acceptable or sensible. Recall that the whole point of this thread was to determine whether acknowledgment of a spirit is simply reasonable. (See the thread title at the top of the page.) Not whether it is proven. Or whether it is scientific. But simply whether a reasonable person can hold the view.
For his experience, I agree. But I hope you can muster enough empathy to see through eyes that are not yours. What is parsimonious about discarding whole pieces of a person’s experience just to accomodate a particular worldview? Parsimony does not demand the simplest explanation. After all, the simplest way to reduce 16/64 to 1/4 is just to drop the 6s, but that’s not the right way. Parsimony demands that there be no *unnecessary *entities, and when a person has, say, been to France it is not parsimonious to pretend otherwise.
An interesting coincidence. It so happens that I bought that book a couple of years ago, and was the last one I read in a series of works about consciousness especially from a materialist perspective. It is not the case that I’m uniformed about the materialist worldview; it’s just that I find it does not apply to my life. (Incidentally, I would point out that Metzinger’s views on self are fairly controversial. Still, it is certainly no less interesting just because of that.) But I always welcome book recommendations, so if you have others, I’d like to see them.
I mean the value pair of both its location and its momentum.
Actually, I used “potential of particle’s vector”, not “potential of a particle”. As to what Heisenberg meant, everything I’ve read by him indicates that he meant what he said quite literally. “I believe that one can formulate the emergence of the classical ‘path’ of a particle pregnantly as follows: the ‘path’ comes into being only because we observe it.” — On the anschaulich content of quantum theoretical kinematics and mechanics", Heisenberg, 1927. Anschaulich is translated variously as physical, perceptual, and perceptible. No one knows for sure which he meant. But I think it’s clear that he meant that a particle’s momentum does not even exist until an attempt is made to measure it. In other words, its potential in se is zero.