Why do people believe in god?

Billy T said:
To some extent that depends upon what you understand by "hallucination." By that term I mean a perception of something that is not possible by the physical laws, but is perceived to be real in the external world.

If you read my longer link you will see that I think EVERYTHING we perceive (hallucinations and things that are possible / in accord with the physical laws) is achieved by exactly the same brain process, (Taking place in the parietal brain, almost certainly except when we are in deep dreamless sleep). Most dreams are in some sense hallucinations as they often contain perceptions that are in conflict with the physical laws.

When we dream, the exact same process in the parietal brain section is creating our perceptions (a parietal simulation of a world) as when we are awake, but in dreams, this simulation is not constrained to be of possible physical realities.

When we are awake, the simulation is constrained, normally, to be a quite accurate model of real world events. Often there are minor discrepancies, which we call "illusions." For example, two identical curve sticks, placed side-by-side are perceived as if one were longer than the other. If we don't know that they are identical, that is not only what we perceive, but what we believe also. Thus one is not aware that the illusion is not real unless they have prior experience with it and know it is only an illusion. For example, the appearance of a distant lake of shimmering water in a desert is recognized as an illusion only because of prior experience that shows you cannot go there and drink.

All this is the same, true, for the more complete illusions we call "hallucinations." They too are perceptions created in the parietal brain simulation of the external world, that happen to be in much stronger disagreement with what is physically possible than mere illusions are.

As I said at the start, whether or not you had a hallucination depends upon your definition of that term. By the definition I suggested, you did have a hallucination. The fact that it was very real to you does not change that. Often, like illusions (which are really minor hallucinations) they will seem to be accurate perceptions of the external world.

Now if your self crumpling letter was a real world event and not a hallucination, then by definition a miracle occurred. I, and most, I think, define a miracle as a violation of the physical laws. As I have noted in posts here and the longer link my POV about perception is very similar to that of Bishop Berkeley - the only difference being that I have a parietal brain simulation creating my perceptions and he had God giving them to him. (For him, there was no real world existing and I can only infer it does, not prove that it does.)

For him, the fact that the real world he perceived did follow regular laws was a little strange - why could it not be more dreamlike since it was just God's creation in "real time"? For example, water could run up hill, if that happened to be God's fancy one day and downhill the next.

His answer to the question as to why the world seemed to be governed by physical laws was very clever, IMHO. He reasoned, correctly, that if there were no rules (the laws of physics) normally describing / governing the perceived "real world" then God could never work a miracle! I.e. miracles are by definition a violation of the physical laws.

Your self crumpling letter may have been a miracle but it does seem strange to me that God (assuming he exists and made this miracle) would be concerned with such trivial things and not, for example, have made Hitler die before he could kill 6 million Jews and about as many Romani, mental defectives, Homosexuals, etc. as he "purified" the "master race."
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i understand what you're saying. this is probably the most courteous response i've received upon sharing this information, so thank you.

this event was one in a progression of many strange events that happened over a period of time. that's why by the time i got to this event, my reaction to it was fairly blase. if it had not occurred in conjunction with these other events, and if these events had no meaning, i would be inclined to chalk it up to a hallucination.

in regards to the meaning, these artists are not small time; they have massive audiences that cling to their every word, and their message is very important. in conjunction with biblical prophecy revelations that i received at that time, these events will imo change the lives of many in a good way. it's just a matter of timing, which to reiterate, i do not possess knowledge of any time frame. but i will say that the prophecy revelation had to do with the book of revelation in the bible, and had very apocalyptic overtones that signified the coming end of an age and beginning of another. i tend to make the assumption that this wouldn't have happened to me recently, if that new age was not immanent. :shrug:
 
I can tell you exactly why people believe in God. In summarizing I could ask why anyone believes in anything? This includes scientists even though they mostly think faith in scienctific predicitons requires far less faith than that in a God. However scientists are not welders or burger flippers so they cannot say which requires more faith.

Everyone on this planet has some curiosity as to how we got here, however not everyone can understand and comprehend the science behind it.. and frankly we don't want everyone to be scientists we require service and industry labor to survive. So to the common layman, either science makes sense and he can place his belief in the old guys that have worked out where we come from.. of if they can't take that leap maybe a grand design implies a grand designer and that makes more sense to some. Perfectly logical from an objective point of view.
 
dhcracker said:
This includes scientists even though they mostly think faith in scienctific predicitons requires far less faith than that in a God.
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Scientists don't have faith in predictions. The prediction is either correct or incorrect. It is determined by experiment and observations. When a theory makes a prediction which cannot presently be confirmed or falsified, the prediction is given credence based upon how accurate other predictions made by the theory are.
 
Billy T said:
You might also spell out what OCD is for me.
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Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

and i read the first link and skimmed the second link..

my thoughts are..when we are born we have no knowledge of labels..we are taught those labels as we grow up..
so to call yellow as yellow is a trained aspect, same as bouncing ball..we can percieve it go up and down but to describe it to another requires a consistent terminology,that terminology it taught to us as we grow up by those around us,this is where i obsess about calling others delusional as they are communicating with what they have learned growing up,that doesn't not mean they way they are communicating is the most accurate way to communicate such,it is only they way that they have learned it.(this is what is stored in the engrams)

IOW if two ppl see that same event,when they communicate the event two different ways,that does not mean one is wrong and the other is right, it just means that they were taught to communicate in their relative perspectives,so when lori says she has experianced this in that way, i cannot tell her she has not or that she is delusional for seeing it like that..even though i would not see it like that,i would interpret it differently, but that still does not mean she is wrong,it just means she has a different perspective than i,and since i have not learned that perspective, means i would have a harder time understanding such perspective,and just cause i do not understand it does not make her wrong.

alot of ppl i have met will dismiss things because they don't understand it,too many ppl will get defensive and even angry when they get to the point of admitting they 'do not know'..

i hope this isn't completely unrelated to your link.
 
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To NMSquirrel:

The main point of the shorter post you read was not about communication of our experience to others, but that too is an interesting problem to discuss – Fundamentally we don’t really understand well how words get their meaning nor do we understand well how children learn to speak their language grammatically correctly. If interested in the first, read Hillary Putman, et.al. If interested in the problem of acquisition of grammar, Chomsky is the authority, but ironically he is only understandable by professional linguists, Instead read Steven Pinker (especially his book “The Language Instinct”). These two problems (mysteries, really) are much more difficult and complex than you can imagine if you have not been part of this high level discussion.

The main point of my shorter link was that we know all neural impulses from our sensor transducers that go to the brain (most do) are destructively analysed (broken down into “characteristic features” which are then sent to entirely different parts of the brain for further neural processing / computations. These physcailly separate characteristic NEVER are remerged back together in the same brain tissue, yet we perceive correctly, for example a yellow rolling ball (color, motion and shape all processed in widely separted part of the brain) as a unified object. Even more amazing is we don’t mix the characteristic. For example the color processing part of the brain, V4, is simultaneously processing many other colors of other objects, for example the red of a fire truck. Why and now is the we don’t falsely perceive a red ball and a yellow truck? My longer link post is my answer to that mystery very different from the non-explanatory, standard hand waving answer, that “perception emerges.” *

Your comment on problems of communication of color experience to other are very correct. There are no natural divisions in the radiation spectrum of visible light. – No natural division of it into a set of different colors. That division is completely a construct of your culture. (I am not speaking of the fact the names are arbitrary and different in various languages, but of the division of the continuous spectrum which are made.)

I doubt they still exist in the modern age of global travel, but more than 100 years ago some isolated culture had no concepts of color – only of lighter and darker. Quite a few had only two colors, red and not red. Interestingly what we call red was always the uniquely singled out part of the spectrum to have its own name in those cultures that recognized only two different colors. I think this may be due to blood having that color, but it is also possible that it this has to do with the fact normal humans have three different color detection cells with peak sensitivity in the red, green and blue. The red responding sensitivity curve is well separated from the other two, which to a large extent overlap in wavelength space.

SUMMARY: How perception works, is created, is processed in the brain, is the subject my links. That is an entirely different problem than how we can communicate our perceptions / experiences to another. Your posts have to a large extent focused on that as applied to what Lori has been trying to sharing with us.

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*You wanted a "Reader Digest version" of my POV. Well here it is: Perception does NOT emerge - it is constructed as part of a Real Time Simulation, RTS, made in the parietal brain, which normally is a quite accurate model of real external world events. Evolution forced it to be accurate as we act on it, except when we sleep - then it need not be an accurate model of any physical possible world.
 
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Lori_7 said:
... and had very apocalyptic overtones that signified the coming end of an age and beginning of another. i tend to make the assumption that this wouldn't have happened to me recently, if that new age was not immanent. :shrug:
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Well, here we completely agree. In fact today is Halloween 2010, and more than four years ago I came to believe quite an apocalyptic event was soon coming. In fact, back then I predicted that it would come on or before Halloween 2014. My forecast apocalyptic event, the ending of an era, etc. is the collapse of the dollar. That will be the most destructive event in several 100 years, at least, for the average American - much worse than WWII or the 1929 depression.

To be a little more on thread, some who now firmly believe in God, will cease to when they see the chaos, misery, death and destruction around them. Others who don't believe will turn to God as only via him will any hope be possible. In some ways Glen Beck's newly found (or at least new displayed) faith - "turn to God" message is a forerunner of this latter reaction.
 
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Billy T said:
To NMSquirrel:
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oh..i think i get it now..

if you see a pink giraff, the pink, the animal,the colors of each are stored in different places so that when recall is present it has to find all those pieces to put it back together..

IE instead of storing all that information in one engram, it splits it up so your memory is not filled with umpteen engrams all with the same information..

so a perception of a new item will draw on the existing data to compile a perception

correct?

i would argue with the statement:
:These physcailly separate characteristic NEVER are remerged back together in the same brain tissue,:
if i knew more of what i am talking about..:rolleyes:
 
NMSquirrel said:
oh..i think i get it now..

if you see a pink giraff, the pink, the animal,the colors of each are stored in different places so that when recall is present it has to find all those pieces to put it back together... correct? ...
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Not exactly I was/ am speaking about how you perceive any thing of the external world. - Nothing to do with memory and recall.

Vision is perhaps the best understood set of neural processing transforms of the input sensory data/ signals. The accepted cognitive science POV and mine are in complete agreement with with reguard to how the information is broken down as it passes thru sussessive stages and different features are sent to differnt parts of the brain and that there is zero neurological evidence that these separated charactristic parts of an object ever come back together in any one part of the brain.

Cognitive sciense has no mechanistc suggestion how we perceive a unified object, but I do as I think we create the perception in a Real Time Simulation. This RTS is also broken down into the same set of "characteristic features" and they are sent back to the earlier stages where the input signals were decomposed for comparision - that is how the RTS is a faithful model of the external world. There is a lot of neurological evidence for this. For example, the "visual cortex" area, V1, where most of the data from the retina comes, actually has slight MORE nerve fibers comning back to it from the parietal part of the brain than from the eyes! They are called "retrograde fibers" and there is no reason for them to exist in the stanard concept of perception as the foreward flowing stages of computational transforms from which perception finally "emerges" but they are essential in my model to keep the RTS in agreement with the sensed external world.

Also important is that if your perception were from this inward flow thru many stages of neural tranformaiton, your perception would be a slight fraction of a second delayed as each stage of neural processing take time. The RTS, as the name implies had no delay but is a real time model of the external world. I.e. it is an internally generated model, based on the sensory data, but slightly pojected ahead to compensated for these neural delays. That is you perceive the fast moving ping pong ball where it currently is via the RTS, not were it was about 1/10 of a second earlier as would be the case if your peception was the emergent result of many succssive staqges of neural transformations of the sensory input data.

In fact the RTS can not always slightly project ahead in time correctly to make the RTS agree the external world in real time as some times discontinuous events, total unpredictable events do occur. For example, an un-seen firecracker exploding near you. When this happends it takes time for the RTS to be corrected. When these things happen the EEG will have a spike, called P300 as it is positive going about 300ms after the event, but more often called "the startle spike," which BTW is strongest over the parietal brain area. I think that significant conflicts between the RTS and the external world cause the RTS to be very briefly paused for the needed revision to the RTS and the P300 EEG signal is electrical activity associated with the restart of the RTS. You are very briefly "paused" aslo, so you don't notice the passage of time any more than you do when in deep sleep.

I do not discuss how either memory or recall works - there is not much known about that. Read, instead of skim only, the longer post I linked to and you will understand more and why my POV is correct, well supported by dozens of obsevations, which the accepted POV about perception cannot explain.
 
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Billy T said:
Not exactly I was/ am speaking about how you perceive any thing of the external world. - Nothing to do with memory and recall.
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i can't find the picture i have in my head as to how it works..but i did come across this that may be of interest..
http://www.brainsource.com/amazing brain.htm
something like this is how i see it:
brainschematic.jpg

(artist conception of the nerve system)
whether you explain it in terms of memory or of physical processes, shouldn't it end up saying the same thing?

you are talking about the physical aspect of the brain?
the wiring of it so to speak?

so like in a computer the data gets sent to memory,but in order to access that memory the computer has to go through several processes to identify that info..
but i think you are saying that the brain bypasses all that processing and the information is accessible in real time as opposed to the time it takes to process that info?

(ever read dianetics?)
 
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NMSquirrel said:
... you are talking about the physical aspect of the brain? the wiring of it so to speak?

so like in a computer the data gets sent to memory,but in order to access that memory the computer has to go through several processes to identify that info..
but i think you are saying that the brain bypasses all that processing and the information is accessible in real time as opposed to the time it takes to process that info? ...
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Again I am saying NOTHING about memory, only about perception.

I am not much concerned about the physical aspects of the brain, more concerned about how it functions, but do have considerable knowledge about
neuroanatomy (I have done brain surgery on Rhesus monkeys mainly as an assistant to a JHU doctor, a neurosurgeon, in his primate lab where I volunteer to help for more than an year.) On one occasion, he was the "on call" neurosurgeon and had to leave to attend a car accident victim being delivered to the emergency room of JHU hospital. I had to complete the operation already in progress alone.

However, neuroanatomy strongly supports my POV about perception being a creation of a RTS in the parietal brain. One fact I mentioned in last post does so: There are more "retrograde nerve fibers" coming to V1 from the parietal section of the brain than from the eyes via the LGN.

Also the gross location of the parietal brain is optimal for reduction of the "white fiber" (axon bundles of nerves) volume. I.e. the visual cortex is adjacent behind the parietal. The sensor cortex is adjacent just in front of the parietal. Then memory cortex (or at least structures that are essential to formation of memory) is adjacent below the parietal, the acoustical cortex is lateral to the parietal.

I.e. all the separate sensory and memory formation parts of the brain are as close to the RTS in the parietal as is possible. - Least axon lengths and volume. So neuroanatomy, both on the gross and on the fine scale, supports my "crackpot" POV about how perception is achieved in / by a RTS in the parietal brain section.
 
Billy T said:
Well, here we completely agree. In fact today is Halloween 2010, and more than four years ago I came to believe quite an apocalyptic event was soon coming. In fact, back then I predicted that it would come on or before Halloween 2014. My forecast apocalyptic event, the ending of an era, etc. is the collapse of the dollar. That will be the most destructive event in several 100 years, at least, for the average American - much worse than WWII or the 1929 depression.

To be a little more on thread, some who now firmly believe in God, will cease to when they see the chaos, misery, death and destruction around them. Others who don't believe will turn to God as only via him will any hope be possible. In some ways Glen Beck's newly found (or at least new displayed) faith - "turn to God" message is a forerunner of this latter reaction.
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i can't listen to glen beck long enough to actually hear what he says...i'm too focused on finding the remote and changing the channel, but i think you're prediction about the reactions of religious and non-religious people are very understandable, and probably accurate to a point. it seems to me, and actually based in large part on the weird experience i had, that in the "end times", the playing field will be leveled, between religious and non-religious people, because religion will be leveled. i do however know that the knowledge of christ is crucial in "survival". not to preach but, there's going to be some really weird shit going down and what the bible has to say will be a real asset to some, not necessarily religious people, but some religious. i think it will become a lot more personal than religion is.
 
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so those that want proof of god will get it,and those who have faith will be tested.
 
Lori_7 said:
it seems to me, and actually based in large part on the weird experience i had, that in the "end times", the playing field will be leveled, between religious and non-religious people, because religion will be leveled. i do however know that the knowledge of christ is crucial in "survival".
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how? I have studied many faiths and traditions. Just in your opinion, how would a "knowledge of christ" be an asset over one who practiced a tradition of say, Judaism, Islam, or Buddhism?
 
AlexG said:
When? In the sweet bye and bye?
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when he does what he will do, the event will wipe away any doubt from MANY non-believers,but those who are truly faithfull will see it for what it is,for they will understand how to handle the suffering to come,and they will be prepared to go through that fire,it is through jesus's suffering that teaches us what suffering is all about..

would you stand in jesus's place?
 
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