You’re right, because if our brains are receivers, they have to be *exactly *like our TVs :rolleyes:
Good thing I never said this is my hypothesis then, isn’t it?
(BTW I assume you object to the many-worlds hypothesis also, as unscientific rubbish and the moral equivalent of creationism, since it is unfalsifiable and there are no experiments to verify it)
Anyway, if you read what I wrote, I explicitly said “I’m not saying that this is indeed the case (i.e. that we are indeed receivers of a remote-control signal)”
I was just objecting to the argument that “brain damage destroys parts of people’s minds” and “drugs work on people’s minds” necessarily imply that the “I” resides solely in the brain tissue.
Can you say with absolute certainty that we are not in a Matrix-like world, where the “real” Der Trihs is plugged into the Matrix like Neo and controlling the actions of the Der Trihs avatar on Earth?
Because, if you can agree that there is the tiniest probability that that is the case, then you would have to agree that you can have “brain damage” and “drug effects” in this world, even though the “real you” is not residing inside your skull.
Fine. If you don’t believe in it, you can stop wasting our time by posting about it.
It is an interesting speculation, and nothing more. If there was strong supporting evidence for any other hypothesis, then it would be rubbish - just as steady state quickly became rubbish after evidence for the Big Bang was found.
But it is strong support for the hypothesis of a purely physical mind. If you have some evidence against this hypothesis, let’s have it. Otherwise you’re just making stuff up, which is pointless. I can probably come up with a moon is made of green cheese hypothesis also, but hell, bandwidth is still worth something.
There’s no evidence for such a situation, therefore the claim that the world is real should take precedence. Just as there is no evidence for a soul, but is for the mind being physical, therefore the physicality theory takes precedence.
And taking drugs or brain damage to a Matrix avatar wouldn’t produce the effects real brain damage or drugs do. Not unless the support machinery was designed to inflict the same effects upon the real brain. So, no, I can’t show that there is no soul that is carefully designed to fake the effects of not having a soul. Since the theory that the world is all a lie carefully designed to fool us has no evidence and has produced no useful ideas, I feel safe in ignoring claims in that style.
As Voyager points out, if evidence isn’t required, then you can make up any random claim.
There is no such thing as ‘necessary implication’ in science. But there is such a thing as ‘data that makes a particular explanation so overwhelmingly likely to be true that it would be silly to reject it.’ And I think the many correlations between brain function and mental function (some of which I have listed above) make it highly plausible that the mind is what the brain does. There *could * be another explanation, but notice that instead of trying to explain the evidence, you are rather trying to *explain away * the evidence. Why not just go with the explanation that is most straighforwardly implied by the available evidence, instead of forcing the evidence into Procrustes’ bed?
No, I don’t think she was brain dead, but she did experience the first stages of the near death experience in which most people are brain dead. Notice the tears in her eyes as she described it. She touched the hem of spirit and felt the Universe as One, which it is. The experience was very real, but I am sure the skeptics will degrade it into hallucinations for their own benefit.
The words spirit, soul, mind, personality, consciousness, inner self, and many others all point to the same phenomenon.
I understood the video very well because I have experienced the same thing.
The brain is just a receiver for the spirit to control the body. There is evidence for this in near death research.
The signal comes to the TV through space, and if the mechanism of the television is in perfect working order it is able to “control” the television and provide programming. However, if the television is damaged the signal will not come through and may produce all kinds of anomalies. The same thing happens to a person with a damaged brain.
Now a repair man can put new parts into the television and it will work perfectly again. There are no new parts for the brain, but somehow other parts of the brain take over the function lost due to damage and the person can recover some, if not fully. No television can switch functions to other parts, just as no brain could either unless it had a director or intelligence greater than itself to help it do so. That intelligence is your spirit.
What you’re saying here could mean several different things. I asked about the first possibility [post=9584060]earlier[/post]:If damage and drugs just affect the receiver, how is it the “I” has the experience of being the impaired receiver rather than remaining an unaffected transmitter?Another possibility is that the soul does not produce the experience of “I” - that the conscious experience is a product of something else and only influenced by the (possibly impaired) signals from the soul. Or do you have a different explanation the sense of “I”?
Until you can actually prove anything you say, and you have yet to do this in all the time I’ve been here, there’s no reason to say it. Put up or shut up.
I don’t want to see yet another thread driven into endless back forth with wasted attempts to use logic and reason on meaningless babble.
It does, yes.
I would really like to post something more elaborate, but I just do not have the time.
I will try again later, but in the mean time let me offer this.
You’re welcome. That’s what I liked about it too. Both halves of the brain work together but perhaps we could teach ourselves to get in touch with the be here now energy connection portion more often.
Someone commented that certain forms of meditation has been trying to do that for 5000 years.
My gosh, wouldn’t it be amazing if, for the first time, he actually responded intelligently and provided real evidence instead of babbling more willfully ignorant bullshit? Not going to happen.
Dismissing the evidence-free proposition of a “soul” existing anywhere but in the operations of the brain, we can still deal with the “innermost self” idea. What exactly does it mean? Do we, deep down there in our mind thingies, have an enduring identity that’s independent of changes in our observable personality? At any given moment, it feels that way – but how else could it feel?
“Feel” isn’t really the right word – it’s more like I have a mental image of my mind as having some immutable “self” at the core, containing my most basic moral compass and sense of being an “I”, surrounded by a cloud of likes and dislikes, drives, desires and fears, tendencies and habits and quirks.
Thing is, the human mind is complex enough to, in thinking about itself, imagine that it works in ways it doesn’t actually work. Where am I going with this? In the truest sense, I don’t know.
Edited to disable smilies; otherwise the colon and parenthesis in the first line would turn into a happy smilie face.
Not so quick to judge, I and the lady were describing personal experiences, and how can you prove them or even need to. Millions of people have had similar experiences. You just believe them or not believe them or withhold opinion for further information.
No. She desceribed a personal experience, and you attributed something to it you had neither business nor reason to. You have repeatedly made claims that you will not, and apparently cannot support, this is just the latest in the string.
Your biggest and most often repeated ‘argument’ is that demonstrably false logical fallacy, Argumentum ad populum. You have never shown that more than one person has ever shared your personal experience, much less that millions have.
If you have something other than an opinion to add to this debate, please do. but I won’t be holding my breath.
One of the things that led me to post in this thread was the expressed intent to keep the discussion somewhat grounded. For me, attempting to define the self in terms of the ability to distinguish right from wrong or the “authentic” from the “inauthentic” is too close to a flight of fancy.
However, I am intrigued by the idea that the “innermost” self is that which we ourselves nurture. It seems to me that we attribute to the self the nice, warm, enlightened aspects of ourselves. (I would guess that SDMB posters would attribute to their inner selves the quality of intelligence.)
It was the innermost self that held the baby girl on the day she was born, but not that same self that called her a whore when she was fifteen and the less said about who paid for the abortion later that same year, the better.
Is it more difficult to believe that there are (at least) two different aspects of yourself, the innermost and the outermost, rather than to believe that there is no self, as such?
Personally, I think this is a simple linguistic illusion, as opposed to what I call the spooky illusions of Richard Bach and that ilk.
If one asks the question, what is my outermost self?, there seems to be a simple answer, my skin, or something like that. Then one asks, what is my innermost self, what is it like? Is it conscious? Does it have any physical qualities? Does it have size, location, temperature?
I can’t answer any of those questions, but I think I can point out the error.
Let’s say I make a claim that there are no unicorns.
There are no pink unicorns with mother-of pearl horns. There are no baby blue unicorns standing a mere 5 and a half hands high with pure ivory horns. There are definitely no plaid unicorns with adamantium horns.
There are no leprechauns with bright green suits and tam-o-shanters with shamrocks bobbing at the headband. And even if there were small, pink humanoids with the words achy-breaky heart tattooed in the form of an inverted heart shape around their navels, green tam-o-shanters (sans shamrock) and a horn growing out of their foreheads, they would NOT be leprecorns.
In these assertions, I seem to have defined three similar things two dissimilar things and, possibly, two separate categories of things, all of which share the characteristic of not existing.
Likewise with the idea of the self, or more simply, the idea of an inner self. Is there really a different self in charge when one swears at the old lady blocking traffic in front of one’s car? Does the inner self curl up and lay at the foot of one’s bed while one sleeps?
Is there any reason that the answer to the question of what the outer self is can’t be the same as the answer to what the inner self is?
I’m quite open to the possibility of the sense of self being an illusion our minds create.
Be that as it may, the illusion or reality, is fed by something. It seems to me that he deeper an emotion resides, the more it gets attributed to this innermost self/soul thing. Your argument that we tend to credit the positives to our self image and disavow “lapses” in judgment I think is well founded.
I do think my original questions remain, but I like the current trajectory as well.
Where will the word soul only suffice - and innermost self will not? Where does the sense of soul, or whatever it is, arise? And now… is there really a more authentic self than the outer-self?
To double back just a bit, I think we all have the experience of doing something and feeling that it just doesn’t sit well with our guts. Where does that come from, then?
(Let me allow that I think the brain is rather adapted towards the meta. To the point that it can go meta-meta, and meta-meta-meta, etc. I think that matters to the discourse somehow.)