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So the evidence for the claim is that a book made the claim? Are you even TRYING to make any sense here, or are you just playing a joke?
You were asked to evidence the claim and you did nothing but post a 23 second video that had not just little, but ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with it.
Yes the book claimed that, and since the beginning I am giving evidences for other amazing claims
to confirm that this book is from Allah then by default any other amazing thing such as parting the sea is confirmed without evidence , but also we need to confirm that nothing is added or deleted or modified into the words of Allah and that can be done also.
and here is another evidence
we know who invented the plane and the car and the train but not who invented the ship
The Messenger of Allah Noah peace be upon him invented the Ship by Allah Revelation
"And construct the ship under Our Eyes and with Our Revelation,
and call not upon Me on behalf of those who did wrong; they are surely to be drowned." The Holy Quran 11.37
I am all for using language in artistic ways and with artistic license. I do it myself a lot. But I tend to try avoiding doing it with words that are, or could potentially be, core to the subject. That risks implying, or looking like you are attempting to imply, something relevant to the topic.
You are right. I'm going to completely concede this point to you. It was sloppy and ill-advised for me to use the word 'intelligence' in this context, and I apologize for doing so.
I was basically trying to get at the idea that cells can be thought of as astonishingly complex "bio-computers." They don't have nervous systems, but they do have some surprisingly complex molecular "logic gates" that serve, in effect, to "process information".
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I would now likely say the exact same thing about the word "information". Like "intelligence" it is a word that risks saying more, or attempting to carry more, than it should. Not a PROBLEM per se, but as I said it is worth us being sensitive to parsing it correctly as you write it.
Here I want to try to defend myself. I am inclined to say that cells do, for all practical purposes, "process information" - albeit not quite in the same way as nervous systems or computers process information. In my own defense, I will say that I get this notion of information processing directly from cell biologists (not philosophers of biology, but from actual biological literature). Here is one example:
A cell is highly responsive to specific chemicals in its environment. Hormones are chemical signals that tell a cell to respond to a change in conditions. Molecules in food or aromas communicate taste and smell through their interaction with specialized sensory cells. This chapter provides an overview of information metabolism—how cells receive, process, and respond to information from the environment. The results of genome-sequencing efforts have underscored how widespread and diverse these information-processing circuits are. For example, approximately half of the 25 largest protein families encoded by the human genome deal primarily with information processing.
Signal-transduction cascades mediate the sensing and processing of stimuli. These molecular circuits detect, amplify, and integrate diverse external signals to generate responses such as changes in enzyme activity, gene expression, or ion-channel activity. This chapter is an introduction to some of the most important classes of molecules that participate in common signal-transduction pathways.
Splendid! Your willingness to rethink the matter (not to cave in, of course) shows what a reasonable open -minded persons is like and far from bringing you down, elevates you (I am happy to say) higher in my (perhaps irrelevant ) estimation.
It also is an exemplifier, if i may refer to a thread on Rhetoric, the OP arguing that Polite discussion would benefit everyone, of what frank and amicable discussion looks like.
As that OP suggested, your approach opens the door to our considering your suggestions and views in more detail without having a battle on our hands.
We could now move on to considering what the implications there are in the complex processes cell walls (for example) as related to the topic.
There is an element of needing Occams Razor at play there though. I think you are attempting to explain things in a way that is massively overly complicated, and requires recourse to things and concepts that you have not presented any substantiation for independently.
This brings us back to a thorn in our sides that has been irritating many of us over the course of many threads over the past few years. I know this will go a bit off-track of what you were aiming at, but I want to take a few minutes to tackle the concept of qualia.
There is a fascinating, but frustrating, breakdown of communication between intelligent people who seem to come into these discussions from seemingly incongruent perspectives. (I wonder if this could correlate with an "N" vs. "S" divide in the Meyer's Briggs personality categories??? Just a passing thought. I am INTP.) I do not see why the introduction of qualia should have to make things "overly complicated". It is difficult (probably impossible?) to construct descriptions of the subjective aspects of qualia (the infamous qualitative "raw feels" aspects) in publically accessible terms (e.g., explaining what "blue" is like to a congenitally blind person, or the phenomenal feel of "red" to Mary before she leaves her black & white room, etc.), but even after countless debates I am still baffled by how forcefully some people hold to the supposed "incomprehensibility" of qualia. I can see how non-philosophers might be initially baffled by the idea of focusing attention on some alleged "inner" quality, but once the idea is introduced, I don't see why the concept continues to be such a mystery for some people. The best I can come up with is that qualia are, in effect, too obvious - so intricate to every aspect of every moment of conscious experience, that the mental act of "stepping back" and turning qualia into an "object" of awareness for the purposes of abstract analysis seems just too wildly abstract, "ivory-tower-ish", or rampantly misguided for certain people to take seriously.
For the person who intuitively understands qualia, the request to provide "independent substantiation" (i.e., repeatable 3rd-person empirical evidence) is obviously absurd. It is like asking for evidence that yesterday really happened. Every time you point to some evidence - a newspaper article, some memory you have, etc. - the exasperating skeptic says "But all of that is just popping into existence now; you have still no shown me any evidence of this thing you are calling "yesterday" - you are just making thing massively complicated by referring to this weird "yesterday" stuff that you can't show exists. You can't even prove to me that this absurdly abstract "yesterday" concept you keep referring to is even a coherent concept.
This metaphor is limited, of course, as all metaphors are. Technically, it is possible to be rationally skeptical about the "existence" of "yesterday" because "yesterday" really is, in some sense, non-existent at the present moment, and literally cannot be referenced except via current memory, and current memory can be flawed. Qualia, on the other hand, are logically unavoidable for essentially the same logical reason that Descartes was correct to suggest that thinking implies existence. With qualia, you admittedly have the problem of "objectifying the subjective" which means that as soon as you succeed in making a quale the object of your attention, you have, to some extent, "lost" its subjective essence. But what you are now focusing on - the objectified quale - is, itself, just another layer of subjective qualia. You can't logically escape the subjectivity of your perspective on anything, which leads to the realization that "objectivity" itself is only known subjectively. So "independent substantiation" - establishing the objective reality of something - is, ultimately, a matter of inter-subjectivity.
Here you should say "See! I told you it was massively overly complicated!" But notice what is complicated. The intuition itself is not complicated. A quale is ultimately the simplest thing you can ever confront. What's complicated it trying to explain this outrageously simple and logical intuition to someone who insists "I don't know what you are talking about. I need you to explain it to me in public language without requiring me to do any introspecting about this supposed "qualia" that I'm skeptical about in the first place." Or: "Show me what it is like for you to experience blue, but you have to do it without requiring me to experience anything blue because I don't know what you mean by "experiencing qualitative blue" in the first place." That is the sort of thing that gets massively complicated.
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I know this little rant has very little to do with what you were referring to in the quote above, and I will probably regret even posting it, but I really had to get it off my chest.
Perhaps I was harsher on the "intelligence"/"Information" point than necessary. Though I did try to mediate that by pointing out I was not exactly saying I have a problem with EITHER word use, but the method and context of it's use just turned on a higher level "sensitivity" to further usages of it.
That is more from experience than anything YOU particularly said. I have merely seen the words "intelligence" and "information" used in the contexts of this, and very similar, topics to smuggle in ideas that the speaker could not get in the front door. And there is a part of my brain that has trained itself to light up and start "deep scanning" peoples prose when either of them is used in a similar fashion.
It genuinely is an experienced based linguistic paranoia, with good basis, rather than anything particularly related to you.
Sure the Cell is complex. Complex is subjective though. To some people Calculus is complex. To me most of it s relatively simple. But yes I would say relatively speaking the average cell, not just human ones, are very complex and impressive and awe inspiring. But it appears, from all our science, that their origins, evolution and working all have relatively simply biological explanations.
Of course people invent complex explanations, or even supernatural explanations, for their existence and their workings. But there is little reason to expect that any of the real explanations are anything but the mundane and relatively simple machinations of Evolution by Natural Selection.
I fear our discussion on NDE is similar. We have something that appears at first to be a complex problem, but as I said in my previous two posts there is NOTHING on offer at this time to expect anything but relatively simple explanations for it all. Many aspects of NDE And OBE have already rational explanations, up to and including the point that we are able to artificially induce many of them.
Things like feeling yourself out of your own body can be stimulated in many ways. The correct kind of meditation, certain drugs, physical duress such as centrifugal force machines, or even minor versions you can do on your own table top merely by starting at, and rubbing, you own hand in the right way. We understand not only how to stimulate and elicit it, we have pretty much explained how and why and where in the brain it happens.
And again Blind Sight is a wonderful example of this practice of seeking complex explanations for what turns out to be highly simple phenomena. We saw a complex initially inexplicable phenomenon..... and of course people instantly started "explaining" it with all kinds of woo and often "quantum" based ideas.
In fact your narrative in post #112 was very similar to what I read about blind sight from some people. People talking about how these "blind" people were somehow accessing some kind of "quantum" "inter-connectivity" and were accessing "visions" of reality via that. I could almost LIFT some of their text and place it into post #112 verbatum and it would fit exactly. Reading your post I literally felt myself pushed back in time like I was reading those posts from people years and years ago when blind sight was first observed.
The word "quantum" is the Deepak chopra go to buzz word of choice for the self styled philosopher of the modern age.
But then we suddenly found this "secondary" visual pathway, similar to one that exists in insect catching lizards, that is still active, though all but vestigial, in humans and it offered a mundane but precise explanation for the entire thing. And suddenly all the quantum level woo merchants fell silent, waiting for the next "god of the gaps" to slot their "ideas" into.
I really genuinely see no reason as yet to think this will be any different. But I await progress on it agog.
This brings us back to a thorn in our sides that has been irritating many of us over the course of many threads over the past few years. I know this will go a bit off-track of what you were aiming at, but I want to take a few minutes to tackle the concept of qualia.
There is a fascinating, but frustrating, breakdown of communication between intelligent people who seem to come into these discussions from seemingly incongruent perspectives. (I wonder if this could correlate with an "N" vs. "S" divide in the Meyer's Briggs personality categories??? Just a passing thought. I am INTP.) I do not see why the introduction of qualia should have to make things "overly complicated". It is difficult (probably impossible?) to construct descriptions of the subjective aspects of qualia (the infamous qualitative "raw feels" aspects) in publically accessible terms (e.g., explaining what "blue" is like to a congenitally blind person, or the phenomenal feel of "red" to Mary before she leaves her black & white room, etc.), but even after countless debates I am still baffled by how forcefully some people hold to the supposed "incomprehensibility" of qualia. I can see how non-philosophers might be initially baffled by the idea of focusing attention on some alleged "inner" quality, but once the idea is introduced, I don't see why the concept continues to be such a mystery for some people. The best I can come up with is that qualia are, in effect, too obvious - so intricate to every aspect of every moment of conscious experience, that the mental act of "stepping back" and turning qualia into an "object" of awareness for the purposes of abstract analysis seems just too wildly abstract, "ivory-tower-ish", or rampantly misguided for certain people to take seriously.
For the person who intuitively understands qualia, the request to provide "independent substantiation" (i.e., repeatable 3rd-person empirical evidence) is obviously absurd. It is like asking for evidence that yesterday really happened. Every time you point to some evidence - a newspaper article, some memory you have, etc. - the exasperating skeptic says "But all of that is just popping into existence now; you have still no shown me any evidence of this thing you are calling "yesterday" - you are just making thing massively complicated by referring to this weird "yesterday" stuff that you can't show exists. You can't even prove to me that this absurdly abstract "yesterday" concept you keep referring to is even a coherent concept.
This metaphor is limited, of course, as all metaphors are. Technically, it is possible to be rationally skeptical about the "existence" of "yesterday" because "yesterday" really is, in some sense, non-existent at the present moment, and literally cannot be referenced except via current memory, and current memory can be flawed. Qualia, on the other hand, are logically unavoidable for essentially the same logical reason that Descartes was correct to suggest that thinking implies existence. With qualia, you admittedly have the problem of "objectifying the subjective" which means that as soon as you succeed in making a quale the object of your attention, you have, to some extent, "lost" its subjective essence. But what you are now focusing on - the objectified quale - is, itself, just another layer of subjective qualia. You can't logically escape the subjectivity of your perspective on anything, which leads to the realization that "objectivity" itself is only known subjectively. So "independent substantiation" - establishing the objective reality of something - is, ultimately, a matter of inter-subjectivity.
Here you should say "See! I told you it was massively overly complicated!" But notice what is complicated. The intuition itself is not complicated. A quale is ultimately the simplest thing you can ever confront. What's complicated it trying to explain this outrageously simple and logical intuition to someone who insists "I don't know what you are talking about. I need you to explain it to me in public language without requiring me to do any introspecting about this supposed "qualia" that I'm skeptical about in the first place." Or: "Show me what it is like for you to experience blue, but you have to do it without requiring me to experience anything blue because I don't know what you mean by "experiencing qualitative blue" in the first place." That is the sort of thing that gets massively complicated.
I know this little rant has very little to do with what you were referring to in the quote above, and I will probably regret even posting it, but I really had to get it off my chest.
Understand this, my friend. There are those here who will never retreat from professing "there is not one shred of evidence for these Woo concepts" nor acknowledge any errors in their reasoning or knowledge, unlike you. They have a different agenda that does NOT include honest discourse. I understand your frustration and completely support your excellent attempts to explain even to those who do not really want to understand. I wish I had your explanatory skill and patience.
There are people who are "entirely" blind who can not see anything.......... yet if you place something in front of them and move it they can tell you which direction is moves in. [...] Another interesting example is that of hearing in autistic children. Many such children can recount the content of conversations had many rooms away through many walls. There is a nice anecdote of this from the father of one such child..... Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson.... in a debate he did with Sam Harris. What is likely happening here is NOT that the autistic child has super human hearing, but he has the same hearing as most of us but he does not have the "filters" that our brains have that stop us really hearing many things. But we are, at some level, "hearing" much much more than we think we are.
[...] Suffice to say however that the assumption that brain level experience, or processing of inputs, is dependent on human consciousness level experience is a poor one. We simply do not know.
This time I will try to stick to what I think you are really getting at. I understand what you are saying, and I agree that consciousness is certainly not necessary for some remarkably high levels of information processing. We can know a lot of stuff without knowing that we know them, or knowing how we know them, etc.
I could be wrong about the technical claims, but I think the point of the NDE studies is that, in at least some cases, the brain lacks any of the types of coherent processing that so far as we know, could possibly constitute the gathering and/or processing of sensory data at the high enough level for the patient to later say something like, for example: "The nurse complained that the reverberating gomniomnigator is not working right." So far as we know, semantic comprehension takes a relatively high level of brain processing that ought to show up on brain monitoring equipment.
But I'm pretty close to conceding to you on this point as well. For now, your explanation is probably better than my "telepathy" explanation. It really depends on what we know, or can find out, about the brain activity during this time. I really just don't know enough about this to defend it either way.
I could be wrong about the technical claims, but I think the point of the NDE studies is that, in at least some cases, the brain lacks any of the types of coherent processing that so far as we know, could possibly constitute the gathering and/or processing of sensory data at the high enough level for the patient to later say something like, for example: "The nurse complained that the reverberating gomniomnigator is not working right."
As I said before though, step 1 in such a case is to establish that that IS what actually happened. How did we establish that was what the patient heard. Or wasit a case of the patient complaining they had heard something and the nurse said "Oh well I reember saying the reverberating gomniomnigator is not working right..... did you hear THAT" and the patient just goes "yes, yes im sure that was it" and of course the nurse goes "wow" and runs off to the daily mail.
Under controlled situations, with well structured (NOT leading) questions however.... I am aware of few actual positive cases of these things happening. So interviewer bias and influence is MASSIVE here.
So when we question how much evidence there is for sch things, we are not doing so lightly. Despite people with no evidence of their own coming into the thread screaming "bias" and "agenda" about people who notice this valid reality. When someone is too cowardly to answer you themselves, and instead go around telling everyone else you are biased or agenda driven..... well that is all you need to know about them really. Some people prefer to moan about you noticing there is no evidence, rather than take the time to provide any. As if seeking evidence is some kind of sin indicative of deep bias and agenda.
But it always makes me laugh that the people who like to moan that you will never stop claiming there is no evidence......... contrive to never present any SO THAT they can keep pointing out you keep claiming there is none. It is like me coming in daily saying 2+2=5 and then moaning that you do nothing but tell me 2+2=4 in response. As long as I contrive to make the error, you will make the correction. As long as people present no evidence, I will tell them they are presenting no evidence. If they will not change their behavior, it is strange they moan (especially indirectly or vicariously) that mine does not change in response. Is not one of the tongue in cheek definitions of insanity meant to be doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result?
Having established a patient has heard something you did not expect they could have heard though, you merely have an open world of possibilities. Perhaps the anesthetic did not take like you thought (my own mother for example was imobilized by anesthetic when getting her tonsils out, the doctors thought she was out, but she was aware of EVERYTHING, including the pain of the operation) or the brain simply does not process audio inputs like we though.
Recourse to "Quantum" magic and other new age woo is simply not required yet until those two steps that I mentioned before, and here, are accounted for.
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Originally Posted by Gaylenwoof
So far as we know, semantic comprehension takes a relatively high level of brain processing that ought to show up on brain monitoring equipment.
Depends on the equipment of course and what it is designed to detect. Many the lay person to this field assume the machines simply detect all activity. And when it flat lines there is no activity at all.
This could not be further from the truth. The machines are generally tuned to certain activity. And sometimes even to certain states of that activity. So when the machine flat lines it just tells you that ONE Specific THING has stopped. Not everything.
If a machine is set to detect a certain activity while it is bilaterally synchronous in both hemispheres for example, it will flat line not only when that particular activity stops..... but when it merely stops being bilaterally synchronous. So there is plenty of activity still going on.... just not of the type the machine detects.
So unless the brain is devoid of all activity of all types.... I will simply not sit back and assume what the brain is capable of doing, or not doing, during that period. It is funny to observe however that the people who DO sit back and force those assumptions, are the ones screaming "bias" and "agenda" at those who do not. Projection of ones own failings on to others is fun to watch.
P.p.s Of course I may be misunderstanding Gaylenwoof. he may simply be remarking on the amazing complexity and organization of cell walls - as other bioforms, of course, and not in any way trying to make a case for some sort of Soul.
Yes. If you think I am trying to make a case for some sort of Soul, you are misunderstanding me.
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When you think of it, the whole "Intelligent" workings of the body, cell -walls and nerves, as well as the workings of the mind that operate together as perception -and -reaction -gadgets could be called a soul as well as the 'Mind' (in a very broad sense), but "soul" has implications of existence apart from the material of the body and (of course) after the body has gone. Noting the 'intelligence' of bioforms need not imply arguing for a Mind separate from the body.
Gaylen will tell us.
You are correct again. The idea of dual-aspect physicalism does not allow for the separate existence of minds from physical processes. Each and every mental process, without exception, is a physical process (and thus it consists of atoms - as understood by physics - doing causally significant things). The part of my theory that may be contentious for some of you is the "dual-aspect" part of my physicalist theory. Some physical processes experience qualia, and some do not. Qualia - i.e., the contents of experiences - are physical, and I've tried to suggest some admittedly speculative ways in which science might someday be able to model them using more or less mathematical means. When I say that qualia are physical, I am saying that they necessarily have physical aspects. You will never find a quale that does not have physical aspects (i.e., "made of atoms" etc.). But qualia, unlike many other physical processes, can be known from a subjective perspective. Instead of looking "at" them like we look at an object, we experience some aspects of them directly by being partially composed of them.
Just to emphasize: Qualia are "weird" from a scientific point of view because, unlike other things that we observe, qualia are only observed when the observer is, to some extent, composed of them.
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you may have noticed the appeal to incredulity there "I can't see how consciousness is reducable should that be reducible? Yep...to brain activity." But that doesn't provide a valid reason for claiming that it isn't in fact 'reducible' even if we can never explain how.
If I am correct, then the physical aspects of qualia are reducible to physical processes, but the subjective/qualitative aspects are not reducible because these aspects are fundamental aspects of some physical processes. When something is fundamental, it is something that cannot be reduced to something "more fundamental." For example, if electrons are fundamental particles, then we will never reduce them to something else. (We once thought that protons were fundamental, but it turned out that they could be reduced to quarks.) I can't be certain that electrons and qualia are fundamental, but I strongly suspect that they are.
Perhaps I can say it this way: The fact that some aspects of some processes can only be observed via the observer being composed of those processes is a fundamental fact of Reality (according to me). If I am right about this, then we will never reduce this fundamental fact of Reality down to some "more fundamental" facts of Reality.
Last edited by Gaylenwoof; 03-06-2017 at 03:28 PM..
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) estimation. 