Saving Theists a Ton of Grief
- Thread starter superluminal
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Crunchy Cat said:Check it out DDog,
I think you'll enjoy it
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/neuro/neuro05/web1/emobley.html
Good article, thanks CCat! I note especially the disclaimer at the end...
If you like this sort of thing, I can really recommend John Horgan's book "Rational Mysticism", in which he interviews (among others), Newberg and D'Aquila and also Persinger, and takes a critical look at their work. As with Persinger, his conclusion is that Newberg and D'Aquila's work has been greatly over-hyped. He concludes that discovering associated areas of the brain active in praying nuns, does NOT explain or prove mystical states. There is also some doubt that the posteria parietal lobe alone orientates us in the spacial environment (and hence the hypothesis that the observed reduced bloodflow would lead to states of "oneness") See Karnath, Farber & Himmelbach; Nature, June21,2001, pp950-953.
I think such studies are very interesting, however, there is a tendency to over-publicise results to gain further grants. Also, I sense an overeagerness to claim explanations of complex psychological states in oversimplistic neurophysiological terms.
Well, then, we have already done this. There are software programs that replicate and are even subject to "evolutionary" forces injected into the program by experimenters. If by "organism" you mean something made of atoms and such, thats a pretty trivial distinction.leopold99 said:
leopold99 said:
I think you have a point leopold, that science very rarely has "proof", and is often speculative. Also that there are plenty of questions that are so far unsolved by science and to which we may never get answers. The origin of life and the origin of the universe are two such questions.
In fact I would say that the motivation for many scientists IS the profound mystery of the universe... which is far stranger than we could have ever imagined.
However, I believe that science is the best tool we have developed for understanding the objective universe. Are you proposing an alternative? Or that we abandon the project?
Diogenes' Dog said:
Thanks for the book link DDog. I agree, some scientists do fall into the trap of over emphasis for budget. That's why it's always a good idea to cross reference similar experiment results and sometimes just look at the raw data rather than the summaries.
The same thing goes for article writers (such as on the site I linked). They tend to have a bias for *something* and simply ignoring those statements of bias lets you see a more complete picutre (sadly, there is a weekly physics publication I keep track of and it's a constant battle of removing opinion from the results).
There are far more expeirments on the "sense of self" area of the brain that have been performed and it might make sense to take a look at them. I had mentioned earlier of a person who had this area of their brain damaged and achieved a super-euphoric one-with-everything persistent 'God' zone state of consciousness. There are alot of compelling observations of other TMS experiments and some better comparisons of people whom have experienced both TMS and 'normal' fantastic experience.
Rummage around and I am sure you'll find lots of great info and there will no doubt be more and more results, observations, and correlations in the future.
Once again I 99.98752...% agree.Diogenes' Dog said:I think you have a point leopold, that science very rarely has "proof", and is often speculative. Also that there are plenty of questions that are so far unsolved by science and to which we may never get answers. The origin of life and the origin of the universe are two such questions.
In fact I would say that the motivation for many scientists IS the profound mystery of the universe... which is far stranger than we could have ever imagined.
However, I believe that science is the best tool we have developed for understanding the objective universe. Are you proposing an alternative? Or that we abandon the project?
I really must disagree. You seem to be relegating the sciences to the realm of mysticism. Why? What exactly is your definition of proof? There is "proof" in a court of law, and there is mathemetical "Proof" which is as close to absolute as you can get. Scientific proof is something far different and far more rigorous than legal proof, and yet not the absolute of mathemetical proofs. Science very rarely does not have proof for established theories and laws. The edges of science are always speculative, but that does not translate into "very rarely" regarding proof.
Your lack of imagination is disturbing...leopold99 said:
i agree that science is our best course.Diogenes' Dog said:However, I believe that science is the best tool we have developed for understanding the objective universe. Are you proposing an alternative? Or that we abandon the project?
after all science gave us the art of chemistry without us even seeing what we were dealing with.
no, i am not proposing abandoning the project
as to the alternatives for life i have put forth my opinions on that.
I thought you might be blunt in saying no about that.
You see I am familiar of tactics of several theists who persue a line of debate on a subject pretending that they are not persuing it in an effort to support their notion of God, when it is obvious that they are. Because obviously if they bring 'God' into an argument then they have lost all credability and look silly in what is supposed to be a rational debate. Since this is totally dishonest, be careful to keep your cards to your chest or I will smell blood.
You see I am familiar of tactics of several theists who persue a line of debate on a subject pretending that they are not persuing it in an effort to support their notion of God, when it is obvious that they are. Because obviously if they bring 'God' into an argument then they have lost all credability and look silly in what is supposed to be a rational debate. Since this is totally dishonest, be careful to keep your cards to your chest or I will smell blood.
'The bacteria: Mycoplasma genitalium is probably the simplest modern life form that we know of today. It has a genome of only 400 units.
The self replicator molecules discussed earlier have 32 Units. (such as the hexanucleotide self-replicator, the SunY self-replicator or the RNA polymerase described by the Eckland group).
At what point do we say something is a life form and not just a chemical reaction that causes molecules to replicate?
Mycoplasma genitalium is still viable with just the core 250 units.
Would a self replicator with say 120 units be considered a life form or just a more sophisticated molecule replication process?
The boundary between Life and replicating molecules is very hazy, it is not a case of saying one replicating molecule constitutes a simple life form and another is a chemical reaction. When does a puppy become an adult dog? there is no single specific moment, it is a smooth gradient.'
Atheist vs god.
No one can see god? How would you know? There is heaps of literature to the contrary - In other words how do you determine whether a person is lying or not - for instance suppose I am a rocket scientist and present a document of my latest researches - You ask for proof and I hand over the document and you say "Hey this is not proof - It is just a bunch of numbers and squiggles"
- So to put it in philosophical words if you are not qualified in a field of knowledge (any field, not just religion) how do you propose to understand whether the knowledge is true or not?
- So to put it in philosophical words if you are not qualified in a field of knowledge (any field, not just religion) how do you propose to understand whether the knowledge is true or not?
welcome to sciforums, to whom particularly are you posing your question.
however to answer it in my feeble way, I would say, by use of evidence.
by the effect on the senses.
by testing and testing again until it can be proved for or against.
by finding a selection of rocket scientist to verify the numbers a squiggles.
as there is no evidence for god or jesus, other the in the bible, we must therefore reason, that without further evidence, they dont exist.
else we would have to give equal status to all other fictional creatures, which is infantile.
however to answer it in my feeble way, I would say, by use of evidence.
by the effect on the senses.
by testing and testing again until it can be proved for or against.
by finding a selection of rocket scientist to verify the numbers a squiggles.
as there is no evidence for god or jesus, other the in the bible, we must therefore reason, that without further evidence, they dont exist.
else we would have to give equal status to all other fictional creatures, which is infantile.
Well the evidence is the book of squiggles - I guess we can strike this one off the board for one who is unqualified in the realm of sciencepavlosmarcos said:
ok for the rockets I guess but not ok for spirituality - spirituality deals primarily with consciousness so its a bit difficult to apply the senses beacuase what you are trying to see is what you are seeing with.pavlosmarcos said:
Here is a quote that does better than my feeble attempts
"The difficulty is that science always goes by an operational definition. In order to make any concept scientific, you must have an operational definition, because then it becomes falsifiable and hence becomes scientific. An operational definition is in itself an interesting concept. What it really means is that you can propose any phenomena, like Newton proposed gravitation, but it must be eventually corelated to some adhoc physical measurements. Consciousness, however, is by definition the one that measures, the one that does the observation. So how are you going to give an operational definition of it?"
Is it possible to test if you are unqualified? How would you know if the test passed or failed if you are not familiar with the branch of knowledgepavlosmarcos said:
Now this is the one I would say is the most suitable option - if you are not qualified in a field of knowledge you find someone who is -pavlosmarcos said:
I guess the next question to go any further in this discussion would be what is the criteria for qualification in the field of spiritual knowledge.
Well here you jump the gun by assuming that you are qualified in the field of spiritual knowledge - If you are qualified you can tell us what the criteria for being qualified is - otherwise you are just like an unqualified layman scoffing at the squiggles of a rocket scientist.pavlosmarcos said:
There's no qualification needed for fantasy. Spirituality in the sense of mysticism, in the sense of religion is only fantasy. Spirituality in the sense of human emotions that's another whole field, and can be studied, analized though it's not science but it's psychology.
Godless