Conservation of souls?

Baldeee said:
Sure, but then you get to how those bio-chemicals came about, and from there backwards.
"It's no use, Mr. James - it's turtles all the way down."
At some point someone will invoke a "cause of all" that is immune to such "turtling".
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Not really, it's all the way down to particles from fields.....difference.

Now, one can claim that the particle field are tended by god(s) but that pretty well does away with all scripture or oral metaphorical tradition and we end up with some metaphysical force which cannot be appeased by prayer or does not really care except about tending the fields.

i.e. It does away with a "personal" god who listens to your prayers.
I can live with that.
 
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billvon said:
Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.
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I think there is another line which goes somewhat like

The strength not to kill the people who piss me off

:)
 
Bowser said:
But if you destined to be hit by a bus tomorrow, there isn't much you can do about it.
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Well, that's a whole nother ball of worms, now isn't it? Destiny, I mean.

Naturally, being a skeptic of all things supernatural, destiny to me is just another fabrication.
 
Baldeee said:
I appreciate what you're saying but you are using a different meaning of free will.
You are looking at it from pure cause and effect, and in what you say I do not disagree.
But whether someone considers freewill illusory or not, it still exists, just as a mirage isn't what it appears to be but it still exists in its own way.
A magic trick still exists, even if it isn't what it appears to be.

So, irrespective of whether one is considering freewill illusory or real, it remains curtailed the fewer available options there are, up to the point that there is but one option, and then no freewill, illusory or otherwise.
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You always have a choice, there is never just one option. If we have free will. If not, then we never have a choice, no matter how many option we think there are.
 
spidergoat said:
You always have a choice, there is never just one option. If we have free will. If not, then we never have a choice, no matter how many option we think there are.
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I used to think that way also, yet the more I learn about the thought process (quantum wave collapse) the more I am beginning to lean to a more probabilistic scenario, where the brain makes a decicion based on its best guess. This may be deterministic to the individual, but may vary from individual to individual, depending on.............:?
 
Write4U said:
Not really, it's all the way down to particles from fields.....difference.

Now, one can claim that the particle field are tended by god(s) but that pretty well does away with all scripture or oral metaphorical tradition and we end up with some metaphysical force which cannot be appeased by prayer or does not really care except about tending the fields.

i.e. It does away with a "personal" god who listens to your prayers.
I can live with that.
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And the fields come from where, exactly?
Plus I mentioned nothing about any deity, capitalised or otherwise.
Whether you want to say it is fields, or God, or gods, or anything else, the "turtling" only stops when someone decides upon a case of special pleading.
 
Baldeee said:
And the fields come from where, exactly?
Plus I mentioned nothing about any deity, capitalised or otherwise.
Whether you want to say it is fields, or God, or gods, or anything else, the "turtling" only stops when someone decides upon a case of special pleading.
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No, it follows the law of "movement in the direction of greatest satisfaction"
i.e. "spontaneous self-assembly".
Self-assembly is a phenomenon where the components of a system assemble themselves to form a larger functional unit. This spontaneous organization can be due to direct specific interaction and/or indirectly through their environment. Due to the increasing technological advances, the study of materials in the nanometrescale is becoming more important.
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The spatial arrangements of these self-assembled nanoparticles can be potentially used to build increasingly complex structures[3] leading to a wide variety of materials that can be used for different purposes.
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At the molecular level, intermolecular force hold the spontaneous gathering of molecules into a well-defined and stable structure together. In chemical solutions, self-assembly is an outcome of random motion of molecules and the affinity of their binding sites for one another. In the area of nanotechnology, developing a simple, efficient method to organize molecules and molecular clusters into precise, pre-determined structure is crucial.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-assembly_of_nanoparticles

This is not special pleading. It's a "probability".

Robert Hazen explains this concept and projection by the mathematical function, rates the probability for "spontaneous pattern forming of bio-chemicals into living organisms from purely chemical reactions" very high.

start clip @ 25:10
I particularly like the irony contained in the science of "Large number of rare event distribution", which is a lexical statistic, among others, in Literature, like reading a Book.
Lots of common words like "is","and", and "the", but it's the rare words that identify the genre, the authorship. Doesn't seem to need a self-sentient causality. It's mathematical nature makes it probabilistic, and in the face of "infinity" it becomes "inevitable" and "deterministic". Earth alone had internal experimentation of chemical reactions.
The total: 2 trillion, quadrillion, quadrillion, quadrillion spontaneous chemical reactions in the life time of a planet like earth. No designer, just probability.

Personally I suspect that life on earth happened at several distinct places and times , unrelated to each other except for their "common deniminators", molecules.

Each place of Origin developing its own mythological and metaphorical account.
 
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Write4U said:
No, it follows the law of "movement in the direction of greatest satisfaction"
i.e. "spontaneous self-assembly".
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I appreciate that you look for every opportunity to share your belief, but in this instance it is misplaced.
I am not referring to what happens once the building blocks are available.
But what gives rise to the building blocks.
And what gives rise to the thing that gives rise to the building blocks etc.
So, please, no more about what happens with components once they are available, but about how those components were there in the first place.
Okay?
 
Baldeee said:
I appreciate that you look for every opportunity to share your belief, but in this instance it is misplaced.
I am not referring to what happens once the building blocks are available.
But what gives rise to the building blocks.
And what gives rise to the thing that gives rise to the building blocks etc.
So, please, no more about what happens with components once they are available, but about how those components were there in the first place.
Okay?
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Dynamical fields, a bunch of them from which the fundamental components of matter emerge. The self -assembly comes thereafter.
Physicists have found the notion of a field to be of such practical utility for the analysis of forces that they have come to think of a force as due to a field
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_(physics)
Thus in the Standard Model we have, breaking down into the smallest components allowed by relativity (and gauge invariance),

  • 3 lepton fields (electron, muon, taon)
  • 3 neutrino fields
  • 1 Higgs scalar field
  • 3 weak gauge boson fields: the W"
  • 1 electromagnetic field
  • 1 gluon field
  • 6 quark fields
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DaveC426913 said:
Well, that's a whole nother ball of worms, now isn't it? Destiny, I mean.

Naturally, being a skeptic of all things supernatural, destiny to me is just another fabrication.
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Are you destined to die? Can you prevent your ultimate demise? You know what they say...death and taxes.
 
Bowser said:
You can make efforts to succeed, yes. But if you destined to be hit by a bus tomorrow, there isn't much you can do about it.
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Your destiny in regards to your mortality, or anything else for that matter, is ultimately a product of universal action, and more specifically local action. If an independent observer had enough information of a given resolution regarding your environmental action, and the ability to process it, they could predict your demise, whether by disease or becoming one with a bus. So the trick to cheating destiny is to be completely situationally aware, but then that becomes your destiny as well, so in end destiny always wins. In any case its not something any of us will be saddled with in our lifetimes, so we’ll just have to be content with taking on life as it unfolds before us.
 
Write4U said:
Dynamical fields....
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And the fields come from where?
I.e. what gives rise to them?
And when you've answered that, ask yourself what gives rise to whatever it is that gives rise to the field?
FYI if you're still only talking about what goes on inside the universe then you're not even in the same ballpark as the point I initially made.
What gave rise to the universe?
What then gave rise to that which gave rise to the universe.
Etc.
 
Baldeee said:
And the fields come from where?
I.e. what gives rise to them?
And when you've answered that, ask yourself what gives rise to whatever it is that gives rise to the field?
FYI if you're still only talking about what goes on inside the universe then you're not even in the same ballpark as the point I initially made.
What gave rise to the universe?
What then gave rise to that which gave rise to the universe.
Etc.
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A hierarchy of natural orders?
Whatever it was it was not intelligent and motivated. I'm willing to place a bet on that.
 
Write4U said:
A hierarchy of natural orders?
Whatever it was it was not intelligent and motivated. I'm willing to place a bet on that.
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So you really didn't understand anything I initially wrote, and instead simply used it as an excuse to post your own beliefs that have little to no bearing on what the point was.
Fair enough.
If ever you do want to go back and actually respond with something relevant, feel free.
 
Baldeee said:
And the fields come from where, exactly?
Plus I mentioned nothing about any deity, capitalised or otherwise.
Whether you want to say it is fields, or God, or gods, or anything else, the "turtling" only stops when someone decides upon a case of special pleading.
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That's why, "I don't know" is a perfectly acceptable answer. I would even be willing to bet that the ultimate answer is not only unknown, but is unknowable.
 
gmilam said:
That's why, "I don't know" is a perfectly acceptable answer. I would even be willing to bet that the ultimate answer is not only unknown, but is unknowable.
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Well, it's very unlikely that it is intelligent and motivated. Think of what is required to achieve such sentient properties, when we know that the smallest dynamic function is probabilistic quantum mechanics.
I am just keeping it realistic......unlike theists.
 
Baldeee said:
So you really didn't understand anything I initially wrote, and instead simply used it as an excuse to post your own beliefs that have little to no bearing on what the point was.
Fair enough.
If ever you do want to go back and actually respond with something relevant, feel free.
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Are you willing to place a bet???
 
I think a new definition for atheists...folk who dont make up God stories.

A t shirt. .."I am an atheist and I dont know"

I find "I dont know" appealingly honest.

But there are folk who need the make believe and unfortunately there are plenty of vendors to take their cash.

The best case for atheism is that it requires so few resourses but theists need God houses and a huge labour force...
I wonder what the carbon footprint is for religions.

Alex
 
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