I started a Skeptic's Corner thread in another section. I deemed it inappropriate after rereading a warning in the header...that I found to be overly scolding, I asked to have the thread deleted and I came over here. I took a snapshot so I can post what I started with.

Let me get a few thoughts together.


(may be a long wait....lol)

here was my first post over at the other section

somebody posted this over there...

TheRestofUs



--------------------
The difference is; "While we cannot believe a word Bill Clinton says about Sex. We cannot believe a word George Bush says about War."

- The RestofUs

"Only a psychopath can torture and be unaffected. You don't want people like that in your organization. They are untrustworthy, and tend to have grotesque other problems."

- Joe Navarro. FBI Interrogation expert.[color="#000080"][/color]

curious choice of words "in existence" as it can be construed to imply the existence of a supernaturalness or being.

There is always more than science detects because science is only as good as it's measuring instruments at any given moment, but....

...but....

But...there is a major hole in the central assertion or at least implication by science that;

"Inanimate objects can somehow by chance assemble themselves in such a way as to be able to perceive themselves."

In fact no credible scientist will actually say so. Instead they let the above implication float out there like a cloud of fog and avoid dealing with it. They say that science cannot investigate the subjective only the objective, but there is an objective reality they are not able to deal with too, and that is the very existence of mind they claim is subjective. The very mind they use to make that claim is at the core of their own existence. Quite a paradox.

I've noticed recently that the candidates have dropped closing every speech with the "God Bless America" invocation........personally I am glad to see this....I felt the debate (?) by the politicians were exploitive and phony.

Where am I coming from.....I am opposed to organized religion.....it magnifies all human flaws......as the most recent example.....look at the mega-churches. You can tell me they are more interested in the gospel than power and money but I won't buy that......and as far as being a "believer" guides you on a moral, ethical path superior to others........not buying that either.

Reality seems to be the real enemy of religion. Now spirituality - that's another matter.

And I find the realities sufficient to cause me to regard life as joyful even when one individual life, or my own, demonstrates the sorrows and griefs that one encounters along with the natural "highs".

Too many religions require suspension of thought, or obedience to a severely obsolete view of the human self.

TROU would you define what you mean when your post mentions inanimate matter as having selves? We don't really know where the realm of consciousness goes in its spectrum........aren't mysteries wonderful? How boring if one thinks any religion has even a majority of the answers.

lenal

I have no idea what this means... "Inanimate objects can somehow by chance assemble themselves in such a way as to be able to perceive themselves."...please explain it to me.
you say: "In fact no credible scientist will actually say so. Instead they let the above implication float out there like a cloud of fog and avoid dealing with it."

---

I have no problem with the idea of the existence of paradox as a few scientific theories make room for them. I do know your post sounds smart but leaves me without a way to respond. I do not understand your premises. Are they your opinions or some factual data?

This looks like an interesting thread..

Where I'm coming from..
I do believe in God but I study the Bible with other friends who do not believe in organized religion.
I believe in "One Light, Many Paths", but my personal choice is Jesus.
I do not believe in Hell, or that anyone else is better or worse than me.
I have Gay friends, Conservative friends, and some very strange friends...

70s I respect your opinion very much and look forward to how this thread develops..

bt, thank you.


I think?


lol

I believe in existence and would describe my existence as awareness of the world around me. What is life without awareness?

Definitions are more important than anything when discussing the meaning of existence.

For myself I do not believe in the supernatural. I am almost twin with Penn (penn&teller) whose memo on this has been posted before.


http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5015557

if you have any true interest and curiosity you will listen to the audio link. it has a preface that sets up exactly what Penn Jillette was responding to...in context: http://www.npr.org/templates/player/mediaP...7&m=5021211

I guess I'll try to respond to both 70s and lenal. Scientists have a "Grand Implication".

Science has by avoiding the obvious question raised by the very the existence of consciousness (especially sentient consciousness), leaves an implication if not an assertion that inanimate objects (atoms, subatomic particles, etc.) somehow can arrange themselves in such a way to first become alive, and then to have the consciousness, and then to be self-aware.

This is the biggest embarrasement to science and they blightly "whistle past the graveyard" or avoid the 800 pound gorilla in the room by saying they cannot prove or disprove the existence of a creator, avoid the whole subject of subjective phenomina, and even studiously avoid investigating the existence of mind as made up of anything but physical matter. If the mind is just a creation of the brain then the above grand implication is what they are really saying, and they know that cannot be true.

what a grand statement!

---

what is this obvious question that I still am ignorant of?

I didn't know atoms arranged themselves? that would imply a consciousness on the part of the atoms. I'm not discounting that that is a possibility...a very long shot, but still. I think all things are not conscious in the way we currently understand consciousness to be. But methinks you are all over the place on this as most of us are. Slow down and be exact. I believe consciousness is self-awareness and that they cannot exist without each other


I didn't know science was embarrassed. I'll have to look into that one.

It isn't up to science to disprove or prove the existence of a creator since science never raised the issue. Religionists did. Superstitious early man...made up a creator. Why else would the sky cry and roar?

how would anyone measure the mind? seance? quija board? ghost busters? seriously, state what you are trying to say...in simple and exact terms people like me can understand.

There are many internet sites that broach the subjectof science and religion or science/religion or if you prefer, science vs religion, and this is somewhat of a retread for me since during the sixties (BTW when I had the task of steering teen-agers through that social upheaval) later I will post a link to one that I like, meanwhile here is where part of the communication is taking place....... with the so-called neo-atheists----I suppose as opposed to those prominent in the "God Is Dead" sixties turmoil.


http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,...1694723,00.html

What Your Brain Looks Like on Faith
Friday, Dec. 14, 2007 By DAVID VAN BIEMA

A scan of a brain.

Sam Harris is best known for his barn-burning 2004 attack on religion, The End of Faith, which spent 33 weeks on the New York Times best-seller List. The book's sequel, Letter to a Christian Nation also came out in editions totalling hundreds of thousands. Last Monday, however, the combative Californian produced a shorter (seven pages) and seemingly calmer publication that will be a hit if it reaches 10,000 readers: "Functional Neuroimaging of Belief, Disbelief and Uncertainty." It appears in the respected journal Annals of Neurology. And Harris, 40, claims it has little if any connection to his two popular books. Believers, however, may draw their own conclusions — and may want to read his subsequent neurological studies even more carefully.


The current paper recovers Harris's identity as a doctoral candidate in neuroscience at UCLA, his occupation before he commenced what he calls his "extramural affair jumping into trenches in the culture wars." It is an addition to the growing field of brain scan trials, and Harris thinks it may be the first to detail how the brain processes belief. At first read, it seems less dangerous to Christianity than to another cherished pillar of Western thought — that "objective" beliefs like "2 + 2 = 4" and "subjective" beliefs like "torture is bad" belong to entirely separate categories of thought.

Harris and two co-authors ran 360 statements by 14 adult subjects whose brain activities were then scanned by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) devices. It suggests that within the brain pan, at least, the distinction between objective and subjective is not so clear-cut. Although more complex assertions may get analyzed in so-called "higher" areas of the brain, all seem to get their final stamp of "belief" or disbelief in "primitive" locales traditionally associated with emotions or taste and odor. Even "2 + 2 = 4," on some level, is a question of taste. Thus, the statement "that just doesn't smell right to me" may be more literal than we thought.

Harris tested how the brain responded to assertions in seven categories: mathematical, geographic, semantic, factual, autobiographical, ethical and religious. All seven provided some useful data, but only the ones relating to math and ethics produced results clear enough to give a vivid picture of the way the simple and the complex, the subjective and the objective intertwine. Regardless of their content, statements that the subjects believed lit up the ventral medial prefrontal cortex (VMPC), a location in the brain best known for processing reward, emotion and taste. Equally "primitive" areas associated with taste, pain perception and disgust determined disbelief. "False propositions may actually disgust us," Harris writes.

Is there a practical application here? He speculates that if belief brain scanning were sufficiently refined it could act as an accurate lie detector and help control for the placebo effect in drug design.

Harris says there is no critique of faith hidden somewhere in his brief paper. But his next neurological enterprise may be another matter. He is planning an fMRI run that will concentrate specifically on religious faith, which Harris thinks he now knows how to plumb more deeply. He also plans to set up two different subject groups — the faithful and non-believers. "That way," among other things, he says, "you can ask, 'Do believers believe that Jesus was born of a virgin the same way that nonbelievers believe that Chevrolet makes cars and trucks?'" It may turn out that the brain treats religious faith as its own special category of belief unlike ethics and math.

But that is not what Harris expects to find. He suspects the machines will show that "belief is belief is belief." And that conclusion, he admits, may put him at loggerheads with familiar foes. No one, he says, could accuse him or anyone else of trying to disprove God's existence on the basis of an fMRI. But faith is more vulnerable. "People who feel that religious faith is a singular operation of the brain — if they admit that it's an operation of the brain at all — would object to what I'm doing, since it may show that faith is essentially the same as other kinds of knowing or thinking. The whole thing will seem fishy to anyone who thinks we have immaterial souls running around in our bodies."

Which, of course, a lot of people do. And despite the fact that, as Harris puts it, his current literary mode "is not beach reading," they may find that they are keeping up with his academic writings more avidly — and nervously — than they do his bestsellers.

#########

You will need to go to the link to see the brain scan graphic.

lenal

70s liberalism- here is the link that you and others here interested in the topic may want to add to your daily or weekly "read"----

http://sciencereligionnews.blogspot.com/



lenal

Thanks, Lenal. Very interesting stuff.

Thanks, Lenal. Very interesting stuff.

lenal, what initially caused you to go to this guy's site?

Hmmmm. I thought it was clear what I was saying...I'll try to be more precise.

Science is based on a disciplined system of observation, theorizing, experiment, and conclusion. There is no doubt it has taken on by default the major and accepted role of verifying for mankind what is real and what is not in our universe. In other words it is in the business of defining reality by explaining it. It does this by observing the same reality (phenomina or object or process) we all observe and offering hypothesis explaining the nature of their existence. It then conducts experiments to verify or debunk the theory. It has evolved from the earliest forms of investigation and explaination of reality to the present form, where it does not now seek other than physical explainations or definitions for any observed phenomina, object, or process.

This leads to a "Grand Implication". That implication is; "That all we observe in existence, and in fact our own existence is soley attributable to physical processes involving inanimate objects and/or inanimate energy (ie, atoms, sub-atomic particles, photons, etc.) which interacted according to the observable laws of the physical universe, and somehow through chance became arranged in such a manner as to first become alive (non-inanimate), and then to produce mind and therefore be able to perceive (itself) themselves (sentience)."

Is that clearer?

Put that way. I have never heard a scientist actually say they believe that the above is provable or even probable. In fact it is likely impossible. And yet that is the implication left by not seriously investigating the nature and the existence of the very mind that postulates that implication. It is left to presume that the (self-aware) mind is merely a concept and in fact merely the construct of the physical brain.


Let's see...you say you believe consciousness is self-awareness and that one cannot exist without the other. That might be true, but then there is the matter of degress IMO. I believe it is understood that all forms of life have some level of consciousness of their surroundings if not their own existence. We (science) tend to believe due to observation that a plant has less consciousness than an animal, and that we are more conscious than animals. That may or may not be true, but so far that theory has stood up to what experiments and observations have been made. At least at what we understand to be our level of consciousness, we define it as "sentience", meaning self-awareness. "I think (I am aware of myself thinking), therefore I am." While a plant or an animal is alive and may have some awareness of it's own existence we believe that a fundamental level of self-awareness we possess has not been reached. That level involves imagination.

I submit that imagination (the ability to "image-in" an image of ourself) is the ability to create "an infinity" within our own minds. And somehow it seems highly unlikely that that ability could have evolved by chance soley from physical matter and energy. In fact it is very interesting to note that the latest string theories point to our whole "space-time" universe being enclosed itself in "an infinity". I'd say that is quite paradoxical, wouldn't you?

To sum up. We sentients are capable of creation. We can create an infinite universe within our own minds using imagination.

Writers, dreamers, artists, visionaries, inventors, philosophers, etc. and in fact all of us can imagine whole worlds with virtually limitless levels of complexity, and size is no barrier only the limits of our imagination. Since science itself is postulating that our own universe exists within an infinity, I find it fascinating that science avoids exploring the nature of that within us that mimics on a micro-scale what we are learning about macro-reality. IE; the mind itself. String theorists have even hinted that the smallest "particles" of our space time are themselves made up of "string-like" objects that are neither energy nor matter but "something else". Some have even wondered if these micro components of reality (which includes seemingly empty space) are not made up of "thought"!

Given the above, I cannot be too skeptical of the thought that a mind (or minds) has created our physical existence. Whose mind(s)? I don't know, but I suspect we ourselves may have had a surprising part to play in that creation. I don't ascribe to what is commonly refered to today as "creationism" and "intelligent design" for a number of reasons. The least of which is the total avoidance of facts common to the fundamentalist movement. They IMO represent a huge step backwards in mankind's search for knowledge and wisdom. And in fact seem interested in social and political power over truth. But the "skeptics" who repudiate any suggestion of "intelligent design" aren't just being skeptical, but are following the same form of self-blinding they accuse the creationists and intelligent designers of.

The whole subject of spirit and spirituality along with mind needs to be explored further. It seems to me Carl Jung and others may have pointed the way. Both he and many others and even Christ Himself pointed to within.

Just some thoughts.

I didn't know science was in the business of defining reality. Why don't scientist's take the title of Realists? Your Grand Implication sounds grand, but I don't want to debate philosophy or religion as physical science.

Science does examine the physical world...all that we can see, touch and hear...and...what else?

You set up things and ask why scientists don't refute them. I am not a scientist, but I think it is not their job to do so. I have no problems with any string theories or paradoxes and I have no problem believing the mind came about in the way you say is unlikely. We live with paradoxes all the time and the world does not come crashing in and no god reveals themselves in all their gory or glory. Theories are sweet and they are either proven or mis-proven...that is the job of science.

You take what you call "some" who have speculated and run with it. Good for you, but there are lots of speculations about what the strings are and are not. They are not all credible theories as of yet.

Intelligent design implies a creator. That intelligent design fears the very idea that no creator exists leads me to look more and more closely at the most logical explanation (from what we know today) for our existence.

I like jung because I like symbolism. I like Jesus for the same reason. But not many (a bosnian woman maybe?) have used Jung as a justification and reason to slaughter human beings.

I gave my reasons for saying science by default is in the business of defining reality, and even if you didn't know that, it doesn't make it untrue. The mantle of rationalism is clearly one of the accepted hallmarks of science. Yet as I believe I've demonstrated, the very definition of rationalism collapses when you examine the "Grand Implication" closely. It just don't add up, even just in terms of the "science" of probability. Yes science examines the phyiscal world, but even there there is much we cannot see, touch, or feel with our five senses. Science then uses instruments to examine the broad electromagnetic spectrum far beyond visible light and that added new knowledge to the definition of reality. Einstein and Bohr used mathematics to show a new definition of phyiscal reality beyond Newtonian Physics. Ie; Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. Those concepts had limits also and when we get to the smallest of the small (Strings) we have magnitudes of small on the order of;

"If a "string" were the size of an average tree, a single Hydrogen nucleus (proton) would be the size of the earth."

I am not wanting to debate philosophy and religion, but you started the thread on a subject that invites it. To suggest that science's latest theories are just "nice" or something whimsical and therefore not really relevant to the discussion is expressing a philosophy of your own. Ie; You are making "skepticisim" into a religion or a philosophy. My point is this. We use an "instrument" known as mind to apprehend our reality, and in a disciplined way we organize our search for explainations of it and our definitions of what is what using a system we call science. But as we look out at the ocean of the cosmos without, I submit we are missing the forest for the trees. The very existence of our consciousness is a vast unexplored realm and a fundamental mystery, and it and all we don't know yet may remain so if we don't look within. Symbolism is the very language of the Unconscious, and that "Unconscious" is much larger than all we "know". Call that what you like "Mr. Skeptic".

Found it

the first posts...

My 1st post

trou
cutecat
lenal
bigtom
[size="3"][/size]

I'm standing in the corner with '70'sliberal and Penn Gillette, two very intelligent fellows. I remember asking my mother if she believed in God when I was about ten. After taking a few thoughtful breaths, she simply said, "no." My immediate emotional response was relief.

Ironically, when dementia set in, she started attending Bible study! She literally forgot she was agnostic!

sad. dementia often pushes people into an infantile state. but thank god for the cover of innocence she imposes on the minds of infant.