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This is becoming a fallacy that should not be used. You can look it up.
The claim for an afterlife, implies that once dead, our sentience continues. The origin of this is derived from the folk that battle with the finality of life. What we are offered as "evidence" are things like NDEs or OOBEs. Science already has valid explanations for the folk that experienced this. NDE or OOBE proves nothing as it remains a product of a living brain which can be stimulated by external stimuli and yields the same results as say a trauma victim.
Death is pretty final and most of us will invent or hold onto myths to make that aspect of our demise more palatable.
I was noting that the type of atheist one is will be most likely predicated upon that person's personality. I wrote nothing to suggest that I thought that one type was more common than another among atheists, I hadn't given that any thought.
Well fair enough, but I can be forgiven for thinking that if you mention 2 personality types and the idea that atheism is influenced by personality type, you were connecting the two. We're on the same page then; certainly some personality traits influence objectivity vs subjectivity, standards of evidence, knowledge vs experience / feeling, proneness to subjective personal experiences, etc. Biology and environment and upbringing are in the mix too.
Isn't the definition of faith believing in something that you cannot see. Why does there have to be proof? Why does it have to be scientific??? There are plenty of things that science cannot explain. For instance what is the meaning of life? Or even what is dark matter? Which I love by the way according to scientists dark matter is the glue that holds everything together it has to exist the funny thing is science cannot prove it exists so....... Back to mortality....
We have a soul and life is but a quick passage. The body does have an end, your soul however continues on. I don't need your opinions and your research..... (although I have seen what none of you would probably believe and science could never explain). Even before that maybe it is my italian blood but I am one who believes in both a higher power and a soul which knows no end.
I don't think you randomly pick what you believe in I think society itself gives you options and you choose to make your own choices. I believe your argument is a bit to broad you ask "how do you pick what to believe/have faith in" Well lets face it one could pick to believe in the Deities of Greek Mythology or a Pixie named Thaladelous but lets face it nobody does. We are taking about the existence of God and if the soul lives on.
As far as your evidence goes:
Science has NO PHYSICAL evidence whatsoever that dark matter exists yet its existence is commonly retained as a truth throughout the scientific community cause again scientists cannot explain what it is that is holding everything (all matter) together.
Now I have NO PHYSICAL evidence that God exists or that the souls lives on just like you have NO PHYSICAL evidence that God doesn't exist or that the soul doesn't live on.
Point is there are many things that come with no evidence of existence so one must turn to BELIEF. One can choose to BELIEVE in God or Dark Matter or one may choose to not believe as again there is no physical evidence that either exists or doesn't exist.
I believe in God and that the soul lives on, scientists BELIEVE that dark matter exists, but don't ask any of us to prove it. The best answer any of us can give a skeptic is "have faith that they exist"
The Ad Hominem is there as described. I will quote how I like - there is no rule on how to do this or not do this. So stop making an issue out of a non-issue and write your posts your way and leave me to write mine in mine. There is nothing in the rules of the forum that say I need to quote an entire post in order to reply to everything in that post. And in the interests of berevity and readablity I choose to only quote enough of the post to indicate what I am replying to.
You address the poster rather than the post rather than back up your own claims. That is all.
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Originally Posted by MysticPhD
ANY substantive posting of your own in refutation.
What is it you want me to refute? You have provided nothing to refute in order to be in a position where you can then accuse other of not refuting - because there is nothing they can.
THIS thread (not 1000s of others) is about what happens after death. YOUR position is that human consciousness survives death. YOUR position is that the unvierse itself is also conscious.
What evidence or support have you got - which you want me to address accept or refute - to support such claims? Any? None? Some?
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Originally Posted by MysticPhD
The bold would seem to be the crux of the problem. "There simply is nothing YOU can see" . . . that does not mean there is nothing.
You have provided nothing. Simply saying essentially 'there must be something and because you can not find it does not mean it is not there' is simply a cop out. There either is reason to think human consciousness survives death - or there is not. Hand waving with 'you just can not see it' does not magic it into existence. It is simply excuse making for why you have nothing to present.
You can throw out catch phrases like "blanket dissmissal" all day - but until you have provided something that someone CAN dismiss - then a catch phrase mantra is all it is. I can not dismiss what you have not offered any more than I can refuse to eat food that someone has not put on my plate.
It is yes or no here: Is Absence of evidence fallacy all you have to offer?
Isn't the definition of faith believing in something that you cannot see. Why does there have to be proof? Why does it have to be scientific??? There are plenty of things that science cannot explain. For instance what is the meaning of life? Or even what is dark matter? Which I love by the way according to scientists dark matter is the glue that holds everything together it has to exist the funny thing is science cannot prove it exists so...
No, I don't think that's the definition of faith. Faith is belief without a requirement of evidence to substantiate the belief. I believe in a lot of things I can't see -- electricity, air, etc., as well as many things I can't even experience for myself, such as distant galaxies. But there is tangible evidence outside of personal subjective experience for all of them that, upon consideration, I feel adequately substantiates those beliefs.
No one is claiming that all belief must be proved to scientific standards. Pragmatically, I believe a lot of things that have not been the subject of double-blind, placebo-controlled studies. I trust my wife will not cheat on me, my dog will not bite me, my house will not collapse in a high wind, and any number of things. And for most things, past objective experience and one's knowledge base of the shared experience of all humans is sufficient without formal studies. But ALL of the things I listed DO have an evidentiary basis outside of some sort of subjective internal sense or experience. I don't believe that my house will stand up to a high wind because I entered an altered state of consciousness and a voice spoke to me from a bright green light and told me this. My evidence is that the house and virtually all houses like it in reasonable repair that I've ever seen, have stood up to high winds in the past (short of a rare, very severe weather event with tornado-strength winds). My dog has never bitten me and his behavior is consistent with dogs who do not bite. And so forth.
No one is claiming that science can explain everything, but they ARE claiming that what it cannot explain is very simply unknown and speculation about that unknown, does not in any way substantiate itself. Evidence must be obtained.
Also there are some things that are not falsifiable and therefore not provable. If I claim there are living armchairs on the third planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, that is not a falsifiable statement at this time because we cannot travel to or view that planet or even know that it exists at this point. Therefore, no amount of personal rapture about the idea of living armchairs constitutes any reason whatsoever for anyone to actually believe such a claim. Even if billions of humans believe that The Supreme Armchair holds them securely in its lap, and that one day they will live forever on Proxima Centauri 3 in a personal houseful of living chairs, that does not change the utter lack of justification for the claim.
Dark matter is a scientific hypothesis, not yet proven and therefore not a theory in the scientific sense, like the theory of gravity. It has in a sense been indirectly observed ... its presence accounted for in various equations causes those equations to match reality, so it's clear that there is something present that has not yet been identified and quantified. No other claim is being made, to my knowledge, for dark matter. Science does not ask us to accept it by faith; it is simply advanced as a testable hypothesis. Eventually it will be either proven or disproven.
I have thousands of substantive posts that you have dismissed (presumably on the basis of your non-existent authority) without ANY substantive posting of your own in refutation. The bold would seem to be the crux of the problem. "There simply is nothing YOU can see" . . . that does not mean there is nothing. If you cannot philosophically address the issue of life after death because there is no empirical evidence . . . so be it. Some of us are capable of addressing the issues. Either make the effort yourself or substantively engage the hundreds of efforts I have made or admit you haven't a clue how to do so. Your blanket dismissals have no credibility and you have no authority to suggest they do.
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Originally Posted by monumentus
What is it you want me to refute? You have provided nothing to refute in order to be in a position where you can then accuse other of not refuting - because there is nothing they can.
So you simply do not remember them or you expect me to reiterate them from among my 19,000+ posts. You have been dogging my posts long enough to remember what they are . . . but you NEVER have ever addressed them substantively. You simply dismiss them out of hand . . . presumably on your vast but undemonstrated authority.
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THIS thread (not 1000s of others) is about what happens after death. YOUR position is that human consciousness survives death. YOUR position is that the unvierse itself is also conscious.
What evidence or support have you got - which you want me to address accept or refute - to support such claims? Any? None? Some? You have provided nothing. Simply saying essentially 'there must be something and because you can not find it does not mean it is not there' is simply a cop out. There either is reason to think human consciousness survives death - or there is not. Hand waving with 'you just can not see it' does not magic it into existence. It is simply excuse making for why you have nothing to present.
You can throw out catch phrases like "blanket dissmissal" all day - but until you have provided something that someone CAN dismiss - then a catch phrase mantra is all it is. I can not dismiss what you have not offered any more than I can refuse to eat food that someone has not put on my plate.
It is yes or no here: Is Absence of evidence fallacy all you have to offer?
NO . . . and you know it! You have been privy to the energy/mass equivalence discussions, the quantum field theory discussions, the unified field theory discussions, the consciousness field theories of McFadden, et al. . . . they all support the notion that consciousness is an energy form that exists as a field phenomenon. Such energy forms can only be transformed . . . never destroyed. There is nothing we know about that can transform "monumentus consciousness energy" into something else once it has been produced.
We know that what we produce and experience as consciousness is the mere "delayed broadcast" of memory traces of what is actually produced. Since what is actually produced is a field phenomenon . . . it cannot reside in any physical matter . . . so it must reside in the unified field that is responsible for our entire reality. There is considerable content in those discussions monumentus . . . so your assertions that there has been nothing presented is false. Your participation was minimal and consisted largely of appeals to the authority of others reflecting no knowledge, understanding or arguments on your part of the very complex issues involved.
"No serious researcher I know believes in an electromagnetic theory of consciousness," Bernard Baars wrote in an e-mail. Baars is a neurobiologist and co-editor of Consciousness & Cognition, another scientific journal in the field. "It's not really worth talking about scientifically."
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Such energy forms can only be transformed . . . never destroyed. There is nothing we know about that can transform "monumentus consciousness energy" into something else once it has been produced.
Giving you poetic license with this made up "consciousness energy" idea, your claim here is falsified by the fact that EEGs work. They transform the energy from brain activity into something we can see, despite your claims that this is impossible.
It is interesting how every time you slip up and make concrete claims about science, there's often something obviously wrong about them. That's religious faith for you, I guess.
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We know that what we produce and experience as consciousness is the mere "delayed broadcast" of memory traces of what is actually produced.
Confusing a pointless metaphor for ... something with knowledge?
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Since what is actually produced is a field phenomenon
Baseless assertion
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it cannot reside in any physical matter
Baseless assertion
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so it must reside in the unified field that is responsible for our entire reality
So you simply do not remember them or you expect me to reiterate them from among my 19,000+ posts. You have been dogging my posts long enough to remember what they are . . . but you NEVER have ever addressed them substantively. You simply dismiss them out of hand . . . presumably on your vast but undemonstrated authority.NO . . . and you know it! You have been privy to the energy/mass equivalence discussions, the quantum field theory discussions, the unified field theory discussions, the consciousness field theories of McFadden, et al. . . . they all support the notion that consciousness is an energy form that exists as a field phenomenon. Such energy forms can only be transformed . . . never destroyed. There is nothing we know about that can transform "monumentus consciousness energy" into something else once it has been produced.
We know that what we produce and experience as consciousness is the mere "delayed broadcast" of memory traces of what is actually produced. Since what is actually produced is a field phenomenon . . . it cannot reside in any physical matter . . . so it must reside in the unified field that is responsible for our entire reality. There is considerable content in those discussions monumentus . . . so your assertions that there has been nothing presented is false. Your participation was minimal and consisted largely of appeals to the authority of others reflecting no knowledge, understanding or arguments on your part of the very complex issues involved.
"No serious researcher I know believes in an electromagnetic theory of consciousness," Bernard Baars wrote in an e-mail. Baars is a neurobiologist and co-editor of Consciousness & Cognition, another scientific journal in the field. "It's not really worth talking about scientifically."
You are stuck in the baryonic world and can't seem to escape from it. The Field Theories of Consciousness do not posit EM fields. Libet specifically discusses non-EM fields . . . eg. non-baryonic (what I attribute to the dark energy/matter fields). McFadden's CEMI fields are correlates of physical motor neuron responses that evidence the connection between consciousness fields and physical responses that are susceptible to measurement . . . validating the connection of consciousness as a field phenomenon. The ancient "wireless" nonsense was abandoned long before the modern consciousness field theories. It would seem you expect my knowledge to be as outdated as yours seems to be.
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Giving you poetic license with this made up "consciousness energy" idea, your claim here is falsified by the fact that EEGs work. They transform the energy from brain activity into something we can see, despite your claims that this is impossible.
You are NOT an illusion . . . but the "you" that is referred to has no locus within the brain. It is a composite field phenomenon that "summarizes" the resonant neural activity that produces "you." As a field phenomenon . . . it cannot reside within physical matter, period. Study state machines to see why the brain as a state machine cannot simultaneously represent the brain state that produces "you" . . . while representing the self-referential "summarized" state that IS "you."
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It is interesting how every time you slip up and make concrete claims about science, there's often something obviously wrong about them. That's religious faith for you, I guess.
Not so strange since the one seeing "obvious" error is the one who is actually wrong or misinformed.
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Confusing a pointless metaphor for ... something with knowledge?
You are not aware of the undisputed research that reveals that our conscious awareness is actually a delayed version of the actual consciousness that is making all the decisions and doing all the behaving???? Instead of revealing how little you actually know about these issues . . . why not actually add what you DO know. Instead of making baseless assertions about my views . . . let's subject what you claim to know about these issues to the scrutiny you so cavalierly apply to my posts.
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