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I was confused by your big words, so you went with... even bigger words, and more of them...
Are you trying to twist my brain into knots? I'm a fan of the "For Dummies" books... give me that.
I'll work on it.
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I'm not, but if it's a duality hypothesis (our personalities/consciousness is separate from the chemical workings of the brain), I'm very likely going to disagree with it. The Duality idea has some problems with it that I have never seen dealt with:
1. Severe physical brain damage altering someone's personality, in some cases to the point where they are a different person with a different name, life, and everything
2. Mental illnesses such as Schizophrenia and Multiple-Personality Disorder
3. Depression, suicidal tendencies, stress, and so on
The duality/monistic dichotomy is too simplistic. The issues you raise are all production issues involving the health or status of the production facility (Brain). Anytime the production facility is disrupted, diseased, or otherwise tampered with . . . it will alter what is produced but it has no impact on what has previously been produced. It is a problem of access. Meanwhile I suggest you use David Chalmers' hard problem of consciousness as a primer. I suggest you bone up on it. Here is an excerpt:
The easy problems of consciousness include those of explaining the following phenomena:
the ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to environmental stimuli;
the integration of information by a cognitive system;
the reportability of mental states;
the ability of a system to access its own internal states;
the focus of attention;
the deliberate control of behavior;
the difference between wakefulness and sleep.
The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.
Our instantaneous awareness is not instantaneous. It must form in quantum time. It forms as a composite of the resonant neural energy field that comprises it. As a composite energy form, it exists at a separate level of being from our physical body and brain. It experiences things before our brain even registers the stimuli.
This is all new age nonsense I am afraid. There are many parts of the human system that process stimulus before the consciousness is aware of it. There is nothing magical or mythical in this that requires the invention of fantastical baseless notions like "universal fields" in order to explain it.
When you tap your knee with a small object the legs kicks. This happens before the brain even registers the stimulus because there are loop back nerves in the spine that process the stimulus and send a response before the brain even engages with the event. This is called "knee jerk response" and is part of our automatic reflexes.
There is nothing magical in this at all. It just shows that part of our nervous system receives and processes stimuli before the brain does. Nothing more, nothing less. The same is true of the brain. It is capable of processing and responding to stimulus before the conscious facilities have processed it.
Nothing magical here. No Dark Matter or Universal Fields or Quantum Time.
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Originally Posted by MysticPhD
As a composite energy form, it exists at a separate level of being from our physical body and brain.
Where is this energy, what is it, how do you measure it or demonstrate it's existence. What evidence have you at all that links consciousness to anything but the electrical energy in the wet stuff in our head.
Sanspeur you missed my point which is that even a retarded person with Holy Spirit enlightenment can "get" God, but a super intelligent misguide FOOL whether Hawkins or some other so -called spoke person who hasn't had nurturing in scripture in Hawkins case isolationism with a the obviously disadvantaged social interface and mobility options is a quart low on creationism and God the creator . Hawkins then becomes a very poor inexperienced role model. Hawkins is a space cadet. You need to get over it!!! Naturally we all respect the guy as one of the formost experts in grasping the cosmos, but he is out of his league as Sagan was when discussing God and or creation both men are then incompetent.albeit fools sorry to ruffle your delicate feathers.
Das (Got God?)
His name is Dawkins, not Hawkins....
You are just saying the same thing with additional words...Like incompetent misguided fools...Are we really?...I'm willing to bet that both Richard Dawkins and Carl Sagan are better versed on the bible than you are... Perhaps you are confused and think you are on the Christianity forum...You are the one that is out of their league here and this is not the place to be bashing atheists.
Sanspeur you missed my point which is that even a retarded person with Holy Spirit enlightenment can "get" God, but a super intelligent misguide FOOL whether Hawkins or some other so -called spoke person who hasn't had nurturing in scripture in Hawkins case isolationism with a the obviously disadvantaged social interface and mobility options is a quart low on creationism and God the creator . Hawkins then becomes a very poor inexperienced role model. Hawkins is a space cadet. You need to get over it!!! Naturally we all respect the guy as one of the formost experts in grasping the cosmos, but he is out of his league as Sagan was when discussing God and or creation both men are then incompetent.albeit fools sorry to ruffle your delicate feathers.
Das (Got God?)
Who is Hawkins? It sounds to me like you are attempting to combine Dawkins and Hawkings.
Please note that Stephen Hawkings is NOT isolated. He was not diagnosed with ALS until he was 21. He attended school normally. He attended social functions and parties and married in 1965. He had a son in 1968. Hawkings is surrounded by people who love him.
In 2007, at the age of 65, Hawking made an important step toward space travel. While visiting the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, he was given the opportunity to experience an environment without gravity. Over the course of two hours over the Atlantic, Hawking, a passenger on a modified Boeing 727, was freed from his wheelchair to experience bursts of weightlessness. Pictures of the freely floating physicist splashed across newspapers around the globe.
“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.â€
― Stephen Hawking
What's with all this talk about "Holy Spirit enlightenment", "nurturing in scripture[sic]" and the name-calling? (The word Scripture should be capitalized.)
Those who categorically denounce any or all of the following individuals...:
Dr. Hawking (no "s" btw...)
Dr. Dawkins
Dr. Dr. Neil De Grasse Tyson (the very best science education spokesperson of them all after Carl Sagan unfortunately died...)
Dr. Carl Sagan
...and the admittedly voraciously polemic & slashing Chris Hitchens... (God bless his departed but unconverted soul)
...are so wildly outside of of their own intellectual league, it's frankly embarrassing to me to be considered of the same species as they. Hey! maybe we're not in the same species! Yeah; that must be it!
Me: H. sapiens rationalis;You?H. sapiens illogicus.
Look same; no think same!
(Oh yes, and let's not to ever forget the good Dr. Darwin to begin with)[/i] Whomever suggests that individually any of them are in any way mentally challenged, inexperienced, biased or limited, is an admittedly biased bonehead themselves. Categorically, and by any and all possible metrics.
Also notice that persistent and often multiple Doctor modifier. And your level of accredited education and experience is..... uhmmmm.... errr.....
(BTW, we militant atheists, and esp. us atheist scientists, are more than rightfully proud to be part of this cadre of individuals.)
When it's also fully realized that these ultra-educated, super-specialist, well-thought and very eloquent individuals all espouse (which, for those of you from the Suth'n Baptist Convention Center; means to "puts forth"...) the same essential atheistic concepts and paradigms, but from each, their own individual "take" on these important issues, then where are you left in your wildly well-rehearsed (which is the best I can say of it..) "attack thesis"?
Answer: nowhere. You are NOWHERE. You have nothing valid nor defensible to go forward with, except to endlessly parrot the well-rehearsed attacks on them in endless ad hominems ( <sigh>... it means... "to the man", and denotes a loss of any other competent debating thoughts, debating points or valid commentary, so you go after the person with false character assassinations. )
This, btw, is a common Christian defense tactic. Since, after all, they literally no longer have any valid defensive points against such facts as Evolution, geology, Universe cosmology, quantum physics, super-sub-atomic particle theory (wait for Higgs to boson in to the picture!), "gluonisms", and so on and so forth.
Plus, Christians, who understandably get quite worried and afraid their *** will be "up", simply won't answer any questions we put to them.
Quite the fix to be in, huh? Cornered, with no possible escape except to fess up that they/you have been, as the Chinese philosopher once said, "Wong for so long"!
I've seen sophisticated intellectuals spend enormous amounts of time debating this incredibly boring and irrelevant little nuance.
We don't even need the word atheist. We don't have a name for people who don't believe in chemistry and instead trust in alchemy. We just observe their stupidity for what it is, make a note of it and move on with our lives.
Yes, the word Atheist seems a little stupid itself.
Agnosticism is logically true... it actually means something deep and meaningful.
Atheism ... would be the same as Agnomeism. Really only gives more advertisement for gnomes.
Scientologist anyone... it would litterally mean "one who believes in catagerozing(ed) knowledge"
Physicalism. hmmmmm
Location: Sitting on a bar stool. Guinness in hand.
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Originally Posted by rifleman
Dr. Dr. Neil De drasse Tyson (the very best science education spokesperson of them all after Carl Sagan unfortunately died...)
Wow. I knew Neil deGrasse Tyson was totally awesome. But I didn't know he was Dr. Dr. Tyson. Granted Dr. Dr. Tyson does deserve that title. Because................HE'S A SCIENTIFIC BEAST BABY!!
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An alternate but enlightened perspective!
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