That is one of the silliest posts I’ve read in years! 
I’m not sure if you’re seroius ( :eek: ) or whooshing us all.
Outside of the World ( i.e. outside of reality) is called Delusion. Don’t go there.
Most of the occult is bullshit just like religion. Like George Harrison said, “searching for the truth among the lying.”
check out: OLD SOULS by Tom Shroder
It is about as level headed as you are going to find on the subject. I suspect the system works on reincarnation myself but claim no past life memories. Occultist want to scam believers just like the “normal” religious leaders.
Of course, if the Devil is trying to sabotage us, what better way than confusion?
Dal Timgar
This is a good point but I still think that the idea of the supernatural has a mutually understood frame of reference-- at least for the purposes of polite conversation. I’m going to just paraphrase Potter Stewart and say that while I can’t define it, I know it when I see it (as a hypothetical construct that is, not literally).
[quote]
Originally posted by Bosda Di’Chi of Tricor
Give me one single example of anything that is not governed by physical laws in our daily lives.
I don’t believe there are any. I’m not arguing that anything supernatural exists (I don’t believe it does) I’m just defending the use of the term as a hypothetical construct.
Wrong.Occam’s razor states that we do not unecessarily mutiply our entities for explanation.Supernaturalists often misunderstand this to mean that the “simplest” explanation(meaning the one that requires the fewest words to state rolles eyes) is prefered.What OR actually means is that if there is a choice between an explanation that conforms to existing data & observation and does not invoke other entities which themselves are not known to be “true”, and an explanation which invokes another unproven/unknown thing(say a genie or a ghost) then the rational choice is the former.
For example:
1)God created each species unto it’s kind.
OR
2)Different life forms evolved through a process of natural selection that…(yada, yada, yada).
#2 above is actually the “simplest” explanation of the two choices becausde #1 is a clear violation of OR by invoking an unknown and unlikely and (most importantly)unecessary entity (God)to explain what can be better explained with #2 which invokes no such enitiy.
Blowero nails it!
JThunder(and others):The sticking point here is that even if a “supernatural realm” existed the term would be meaningless to us because we could not KNOW it existed.The only way we could know it existed was if it became “knowable” and therefore natural.Therefore the term supernatural is indeed a null term.
Lekatt:You are the master of the bald assertion!You toss them around like grenades in a direct to video Dolph Lundren flick!
“Give me one single example of anything that is not governed by physical laws in our daily lives.”
You. Show me the physical laws that govern consciousness, (psyche, mind, memory, soul, spirit). That should be easy for you?
You might start by showing the biophysical memory or psyche?
Love
Leroy
Billions of people KNOW the spiritual realm exists. It is the oldest subject of recorded history. Have you not read about it?
Only the scientists in the last few hundred years have questioned it. That;s because it can’t be measured by their science standards. So what else is new. Because scientists think its not there doesn’t mean much. Most religionist think differently also. So what? That’s life. The scientists think they are right and the religious think they are right and the …
Love
Leroy
If a thing isn’t part of your epistemic body, then where is it in respect to you? I never claimed things can’t “enter consciousness” that are totally unexpected. As I said, things are what they are, like it or not. Meteorites unexpectedly hit the Earth. People die of starvation. Fire burns. I wake up in the hospital and I’m told that I was bashed over the head with a crowbar by some lunatic Nr.3 hanging about in my backyard. Ah, I see that EXPLAINS my massive headache.
Thanks for the effusive compliment.
I should not have brought up this dead old beaten horse. I was trying to say that the there’s no vantage point from Outside the World. There are no objective anthropologist that can observe the World without being in it. The measurement influences the outcome of the measurement. No objectivity, only inter-subjectivity. As I said, it’s an old beaten horse. But it has nothing to do with Delusion. Delusion is part of the World [and Bosda, please note the upper case W]. Again for Bosda to get the message: The Universe of all possible worlds. The itch of my toe is as real as the toe itself. Real as in “it occurs”. My itch is indeed part of the World, just like the abstract concept 3! But three tasty oranges are not the same as the rather tasteless symbolic abstraction 3.
The point here is to distinguish between what phenomenological occurrences are part of our inter-subjective “sensational” domain and what lies entirely in the fictional world. Or as Bosda might like to put it, what is Delusional and what is Real.
I object, like others before me, to this word LAWS. Blowero rightly points out that they are “merely our observations of how the universe behaves”. Or as I would put it, they are descriptions for what we can inter-subjectively agree occurs within our sensational domain. I also object to this statement by Pochacco:
I specifically object to the phrase “really just”. Absurd reductionism. Emergent effects of a lower level system are as real as their parent system. What is a THING, Pochacco? Eddies are most certainly part of my sensational domain. Molecules of water are not. Or, rather, were not until by dad showed me a picture of a gold molecule at an IBM lab back in the 70ies. To think of THINGS as something solid is a corpuscularian misconception that should have been shed entirely long ago. Eddies are real (as in part of the sensational domain). Fluid dynamics, wavefunctions and matrices are purely descriptive phenomena. As is Chi for that matter. And perhaps a useful one at that. Or is acupuncture just a bunch of hogwash with no measurable effect? The stakes are on…
Correction:Billions of people believe the spiritual realm exists.I do not knwo how you determined that it is the oldest subject in recorded history but whether or not this is in any sense true is totally irrelevent.
I have read about it.I have also read about The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings but I do not think the stories true.
**
Not true.People have been questioning spirituality and supernaturalism and using the scientific method for thousands of years.Modern skepticism was born in 500 b.c. with Heriticles.
The non-existent cannot be measured by our scientific standards, because there is nothing to measure.Science cannot measure or quantify a jabberwocky, an elf, a god or Wile E. Coyote.
Religionists cannot rationally justify their claims.They cannot substantiate their beliefs with a single shred of evidence.Science does not “disprove” or seek to “disprove” anything.it either finds support for things which are likely true or is unable to substantiate things which are likely false.
argumentum ad populum
Billions of people KNOW because they have experienced the spiritual. I have experienced the spiritual realms and I KNOW they exist. You can call me and the billions of others liars if you want, but you can’t prove anything. It would only be your opinion.
Actually, spiritualists have a great deal more evidence that the spirit world exists than the skeptics have that it don’t. I am referring to the NDE evidence here. Many have been converted by it. It is even shown under controlled scientific studies to be so.
No one tried to answer my other post. Is a thought not real? Can you measure it? How about consciousness? Is it real or delusion? Can science measure it? Where is the memory in the brain? Can you show it to me? Show me the biophysical reasoning of the brain to produce thought. Who are you, just a few pounds of meat, ok, where are you and what are you, a brain, or something greater than your body.
Only a small bit of reasoning about the above material will show you how science knows nothing about the human individual.
You skeptical “scientists” are just like the “bible thumpers” if it doesn’t fit into your small concepts of the world it must be wrong.
You will have to find the bio-physical mind, memory, etc. to get me to reconsider my experience.
Love
Leroy
I thank you all for your interesting responses…I actually printed them up so that I can peruse them later as I have little patience with sitting at this machine and reading glary literature (crick in neck).
BUT no one has explained the selfness that I was talking about…Do you feel, as I do, that it is so unexplainable and fascinating that we are our individual selves? How do you account for the fact that you are you and no one else? Where does your “you-ness” come from? Poccacho stated very articulately that our brains are a bunch of like-minded neurons, and that our conciousness comes from the fact that they are all working together in a sort of common cause, but that doesn’t explain our own particular vantage point, if you will.
I presented the possibiity of accepting The Amazing Randi’s challenge and he grumbled and said something about it not being a dog and pony show, but then I mentioned the million dollars, and he is now considering it. I have seen him do this with my own eyes, but like I said, there may not be anything extra-sensory about it at all, and it seems more likely that his talents come from knowing the land (he is from a long line of farmers), than any other unknown influence.
Wrong. It has been addresses. Where do you get these polemic cliches from? Science does not attempt to measure thought. It may measure brain waves. But not thoughts, that which is emergent of what we see on an encephalogram. Science is thought in and of itself! Again, it is a descriptive discipline to model what we agree we sense. If you hop around saying “I have experienced Buddha nature”, then so be it. Buddha nature is an inner experience with no counter part in the sensational world that we all share. We can’t stand around and marvel at the rough surface or bold lines of Buddha nature in a communal setting unless we are very high on psychotropic drugs. What is true, is that people have spiritual experiences. And science models that as best it can, invoking as few redundancies as possible while maintaining usefulness of the model.
You are trying unify everything under the cloak of spirituality(thought?). How can I dismiss that everything known to me is known to me through my psyche? But that helps us zilch in predicting anything, which is the main use of science. You can only unify to the point where it retains any meaningfulness. To say that my warm steaming cup of coffee is a thought is as enlightening as saying that when I walk I walk. Are you going to disagree that their are differences between my cup of coffee and a CIRCLE? Differentiating is not as evil as you may think. Once the monk comes down from his lonely mountain peek, he gets drunk with the butcher. What were not mountains are again mountains. What was not water is again water…
You really didn’t answer any of the questions I asked. Science says man is a piece of meat. So show me the memory, show me the biology.
How is thought emergent. How does biology turn into energy waves (brain waves). By what process can cells create energy waves. These waves, are they like radio waves? What are their nature. How do you know the “waves” are coming from the brain instead of going to the brain, as a spirit might send energy waves to the brain for control of the body.
And, your description of spirit is somewhat strange, to a Monk water is always water.
This link will help to explain what a spiritual experience consists of:
No biggie.
Thought & consciousness are a product of electrochemical interactions in the brain. Each nerve cell comes equipped with dendrites–long threadlike extensions–that lead from one neuron to another, providing various “pathways” for electrical current to travel from one cell to the other. Billions of these cells are connected, by a vast-but-as-yet-unmeasured number of dendrites. (Don’t celebrate, sucka–the reason it ain’t measured is principly ethical—you’d probably need to kill somebody to do the measuring. Brain tissue in cadavers breaks down too fast.) This system of dendrites acts like a computer–it opens or closes “switching elements” that lead to certain sequences. These coded sequences are data storage in the Human brain. Memories, behavior, motor control of muscles, it’s all stored & run this way.
One of the various neurosurgeons on the Board can give you the finely crafted details, but that’s the skinny.
As for the spirit–prove we have one first.
You claimed it exists, the burden of proof is on you.
It does not. Please cite what relevant scientific theories state that “man is meat”. Again (I feel like I’m repeating myself): science is not about the infinitly regressive “How, I mean really, how?”. It’s just a useful tool to DESCRIBE something as elegantly as possible! What that something is I don’t know. But it sure as hell is there…
You understanding of science seems to come out of a 19th century text book written by clueless journalists. When you think of science you seem to think of corpuscularianism. Wake up, that model was dismissed long begore even my grandfather crawled out of his cradle.
And by the way the monk story is taken from the Rinzai side of Zen culture. We must journey far sometimes before we come back home.
You should try the scientific minded versions of the koan one day: the elusive paradox, infinite regression, the connective space between epistemic units. What you call Scientists are not as stupid as you may think…
Well, I certainly agree with you that the second answer is the simpliest explanation. I do not see a contradiction in the definition I gave and the one that you gave. I am aware that there is debate on the definition of Occam’s razor. I am not, however, a scientist. If this is your field, then I won’t argue with you further about the definition. If that is not your field, that goes a long way toward explaining your responses.
I do hope that you don’t believe that skeptics should be close-minded. That would be a rather unscientific approach, wouldn’t it?
Is this the statement you are referring to?
If so, that was my statement and you have twisted it and made all sorts of assumptions and erroneous statements. You don’t need to be clearing up any “old wives’ tales” for my sake. I’ve been aware for decades that the statement that we use only about 10% of our brains is folly. However, your statement that we use 100% of our brains requires a cite before I will even begin to consider it.
Just in my own experience, that part of the brain which perceives and interprets vision in my right eye is not fully functional.
Are you unaware of studies in which parts of the brain are stimulated to produce altered perceptions?
I am highly skeptical of your statement that we are dangerously close to understanding everything about the brain. Can you provide a cite for that also?
A quick hijack.
Are you a Sluggite?
Ah oh! Are you setting me up, Bosda? Don’t forget that I live in a neighoring village! 
Okay. I’ll bite. What is a Sluggite?
And for anyone interested, here is a link to further information on brain stimulation and spiritual experiences:
Dr. Michael Persinger is the doctor whose name I couldn’t remember.
Your username is the same as the female lead character.