immortal

You're not the only one who have responded with such rudeness, PeterJ. There have been many and its not anyone's mistake. The problem is with the kind of worldview which we are trying to establish nowadays. For example:- Roger Penrose to establish that strong AI is impossible had to run through Turing machines, theory of computability, microtubules in the brain and molecular neurobiology, Godel's theorems, noncomputable mathematics and quantum physics. Hufff. Many scholars and philosophers are trying to establish the connection of Modern Physics with eastern mysticism. I cannot repeat my position about this again and again, for some I have responded to them through PM and others like TAR understand my position that what we learn from science is one thing and what we learn through religion is another. This is because of the way the world is. So just as you say that there is a reason why all metaphysical statements are undecidable, the reason being the world is a unity. I think there is a reason why scientific realism might be false and the quantum physicist Bernard d'Espagnat has went on to say that "what we call empirical reality is only a state of mind". Here is his argument for holding this position --> http://www.scientifi...197911_0158.pdf. From the begining of the civilization of mankind, all the Gnosis religions of the world and the Platonic realism of Neo-Platonism have been constantly stating that scientific realism is false and the doctrine of Non-dualism or Advaita which you're defending is one among those Gnosis traditions. Therefore if Unity has to exist or if the God of the Gnostics have to exist one of the necessary pre-condition for it is that scientific realism must be false. So I think there is a reason why scientific realism might be false its because our cosmos is established in such a way that when we perceive the world in one state of mind(not brain) we see the world of emiprical reality and when we perceive the world in a different state of the mind we see the world of platonic reality or the noumenal reality. Therefore this justifies my statement that "Religion and Science is about different worlds." If some scholars and philosophers are very much desperate to connect scientific or rational concepts with religion then I and Schroedinger can cheerfully say that God help them. I for one is not going to talk about science or metaphysics when talking about God or Unity in the religious forums. When you look at it from the Gnostic point of view they call the Abrahamic God as the demiurge and go on to say that he is the cause of the evil and when you look it from the Bible point of view they call the Perfect One as the deceitful Satan, the Lucifer. So how do you decide who is evil and who is good or who is perfect and who is imperfect?

I'd recommend Microprocessors and Interfacing: Programming and Hardware by Douglas V Hall. I studied from this book and was easy for me once I got hold of the instruction set and the registers. And also install MASM in your pc to do assembly language programming, only when you start writing programs you'll see the fun in it.

The ancient Gnostic people neither knew about metaphysics nor did they knew about modern science. Religion and Science is about different worlds. If anyone applies metaphysics or modern science to mysticism and makes conclusions then they're doing bad philosophy. Schroedinger knew about this.

Even the government and the supreme court interfere with religious issues, sometimes the whole scripture or the book is taken to the court and its interpretations are argued and a law is passed whether to ban the book from the country or not. Therefore whether it is the moral codes or the concept of Gods both affect our practical commitment and our way of life. Practice of religion without a firm belief in the existence of god is not broken, IMO.

Arthur Schopenhauer in his treatise The World as Will and Representation says that there exists something in humans apart from the appearances to observers which he calls it as the Will and says that humans are in a true sense free Will. See - On the Freedom of the Will. One wonders what is there in humans apart from the phenomenal appearances that humans see, what Schopenhauer is implying is that it is the observer itself which is the Will, which is the thing in itself of Kant. Daniel Dennet writes "That of which I am conscious is that to which I have access, or (to put the emphasis where it belongs), that to which I have access" (Dennet, 1978). Psychologists tend to treat this as the domain of access of the Self and call this as the Observer. Schopenhauer uses the term inner being and that might have been a mysterious term in the 19th century but with the advancements in neurophysiology of fMRI and PET scans we can very well explain the areas of inner speech and the way we use words for thinking and problem solving silently in our heads. So if we lose our inner speech do we lose our sense of self? No, in children who are suffering from autism they don't use inner speech and instead they say out words loudly for thinking or use visual images to do problem solving. We think in some way or the other as Rene Descartes puts it "I think therefore I am" and this sense of Self or observer always exists with us. Schopenhauer argues that humans have no free will and that a human appears to be free if he sees himself as the observer or the Will, thing-in-itself. The observer doesn't have complete access to the thing-in-itself, he appears as free only when he thinks himself as the thing-in-itself. There is something which is denying access to the thing-in-itself for the observer and hence humans absolutely have no free will as long as they are subjected to the constraints of the phenomenal world.

How can you objectively conclude what's bad and what's good at the individual level, we are talking about individual people here right. The canadian psycho killer who was recently caught in Berlin had sent his boyfriend's body pieces to the prime minister of Canada, his conscience says that it is great to practice cannibalism and openly stated that next time its not going to be animals and I'm sure there are other psycho killers who think that cannibalism is good. Now there are a few people who think that killing is right and the majority of other people who think that killing is wrong. We put the former people in jails because its just normally not accepted by the society. So what's good and what's bad are abstract concepts and these abstract concepts determine our motives which doesn't have any basis in reality, there is no such thing as true goodness and true badness in reality. Even God is an abstract concept or an idea which we derive it from the scriptures and affects our motives i.e leads to the practice of religion. So why belief in the moral codes is not considered as broken and a belief that God may exist is considered broken?

Oxidative phosphorylation is indeed taught in the 12th grade. I'm not sure in which grade R A J A is in.

If you stop murdering people based on your logically indefensible belief that Murder is bad then how is this different from people practicing a religion based on their logically indefensible belief that God may exist. So people who practice religion to evaluate the existence of God are not as broken as people who claim God is real without knowing he exists or not?

It seems chemists very well understand about chirality and producing a particular form of chiral enantiomers. http://www.websterworld.com/websterworld/scienceupdates/b/backgrounderonchirality525.html What is the common consensus about the origin of homochirality in biomolecules among chemists. Did homochirality preceeded origin of life or was it a consequence of life itself. What do you think? http://www.simsoup.info/Origin_Issues_Homochirality.html

You will clearly understand how data is manipulated at the lowest level.

I love assembly language programming and Yes, I'd recommend you to learn assembly language programming to clearly understand CPU architectures like 8086/8085. Every architecture has its own instruction set and registers to deal with the data and its manipulation and its very useful for embedded systems.

Its a very good point. We try to adopt evolutionary stable strategies while playing the real world games in our interaction with the society. I see no logical reason as to what is going to stop someone from killing them. Religion teaches us that its wrong to kill even when someone is not observing you because there is always the one who is witnessing everyone's acts i.e God but this is not logically defensible. I am not saying that morals cannot exist or originate without religion or the God but evolutionary psychology fails miserably in explaining the origin of real altruistic behaviors in humans. Some suggest that by being truly altuistic it releases neurotransmitters in the brain which induces 'feel good character' in humans and such things might account for true altruism but it still doesn't undermine or overthrow religion or God as the cause of these true altruistic behaviors in humans. Really what is going to stop someone from revealing his hidden animal instincts when society is not watching him or her?

C++ is an object oriented programming language and you need to understand the basic concepts like Class, objects, inheritence, polymorphism, constructors, access specifiers etc. Stroustrup developed C++ and his books will be good for beginners.

So you're basically saying that instead of breathing out carbon-di-oxide out of our lungs we can use it to produce carbohydrate compounds. Nature indeed has found this alternative strategy in few autotrophic bacteria living in extreme conditions which use reverse tricarboxylic acid cycle to produce carbohydrate compounds using CO2 and H2O.

Don't you actively deny the existence of God? I know you're a philosopher and you're coming from perennial philosophy or the rational philosophy. Its your constant dogmatic assertions about God as a hopeless muddle in mysticism is what is annoying me. Especially when you put the God of the advaita vedanta and the Aeons of the Gnostics as a hopeless muddle. Let me seperate myself from the scholars who support my view and argue from the point of these scriptures themselves. 15. The face of truth is covered with a golden disc. Unveil it, O Pushan, so that I who love the truth may see it. 15. "The face of Truth is concealed by a golden vessel. Do thou, O Sun, open it so as to be seen by me who am by nature truthful (or, am the performer of rightful duties)." This is the 15th verse of the Isa Upanishad and it is clear that yajnvalkya is praying to the Sun God who emanated from the golden egg - Hiranyagarbha. Yajnavalkya is saying that this Hiranyagarbha is the Brahman itself. What you're not understanding is that by defending this doctrine of non-dualism you're simultaneously defending this God and you seem to be not aware of this and blindly assert that mysticism is the death of the God. Do you really know the implications of the doctrine which you're expouding?

Yes, this is not the job of scientists, its the job of theologians and philosophers. Scientists only accept empirical evidence, so if you have got any chance of convincing them then you need to bring some empirical evidence in support of your doctrine. For that to happen one needs to be a true philosopher and convince himself first before he tries to convince others. That doesn't mean that we should twist the teachings of those traditions and put them all in the same boat without making the public aware of the fact that there are differences in the teachings of these traditions. The body should not be biased towards a particular religious tradition, it should act as a presenter of these religious ideas and not as a dogmatic dictator. You're trying to hide the truth from the people and playing around with them. You think that if we can somehow do away with God and merge all these traditions then more people will start accepting these things. If you want to be an atheist then please stick to any of the doctrines of Buddhism don't try to twist theistic traditions of advaita in support of your atheistic doctrine. Just because you cannot defend God with your arguments doesn't mean that he is of less importance in mysticism. You're so dogmatic that you go on to say that only Buddhism can be called as mysticism and my criticisms against you as not mysticism at all. Why such double standards? all this to attract the crowd? I don't think metaphysics is useless, I have been arguing about Kantian philosophy from the time before you arrived here. Non-dualism doesn't agree with Kant in his conclusion that it is impossible to know the noumena and his doctrine that the only epistemology possible is from the sense organs but non-dualists say there is another way of knowing the world i.e without using the sense organs and through such observations they say they can know the world the way it is in itself (i.e noumenon). This is possible only with the help of God and you cannot rationalize it, its a matter of faith. Its obvious that Buddhists doesn't know about this because they're more concerned about escaping from the world and its suffering and are not really concerned about knowing God. Another objection to you is that God has a form, we can discuss how he appears, what is he wearing and where he exists in the same way even unicorns have a form and we can understand what these words are representing but this is not so in the discussion of the unity, it cannot be understood through the intellect and therefore it is pointless to discuss about it. God exists to guide us to know the unity and by doing away with God you're making your life difficult. At the end of the day whether you approach it based on faith or rationalize it based on metaphysics or with comparative religion it is the evidence which counts and that's what is needed to convince ourselves the merit of their position before even trying to convince others.

I think this is an important issue. Recently people who were victimized by the leader of a religious cult were not uneducated people, all of them were highly qualified people with engineering and medical degrees and also some of them were Phds, this is sad for everyone. One of the things which I'm arguing is that there must be an organization which studies religion and provides genuine information or facts to people who wants to study about them and should guide and educate the public in the process. It helps to minimize ignorance in the world. The scientific community does a fairly good job in identifying frauds and the pseudoscience there in and in setting up the standards but that doesn't happen in religion. If those people were aware about their religion and its deep teachings they wouldn't have blindly followed a self-proclaimed leader accepting what ever he says and even drinking the water after it was being used to wash his feet. There is a lot of confusion in the world as to who is God, what is its true nature and where he exists. I think it is the responsibility of the government to educate the public about religion so that we can minimize the ignorance creeping out of it again and again.

Thank you. PeterJ Thank you very much. As you know there is just too much misinformation over the internet.

I doesn't want to comment on the Abrahamic God. It would be inappropriate since I have not fully studied the bible and doesn't know much of the origin of Judaism. Perhaps I should look to read a good scholar in this field. There are many different views in Christianity and I really doesn't want to comment on it when I have not yet studied it completely. I don't have any fundamental beliefs and whether it is the Sun God or the Abrahmic God they mean nothing to me, I don't have any personal attachments to these traditions. Much of the orthodox religions do nothing to satisfy our intellect and I don't know what it is like to be religious. I doesn't want to personalize things here and please stop assuming things about my beliefs. You don't know why some of us ended up holding these beliefs or what intellectual changes led me to these beliefs or what I have experienced. My beliefs are based on my intellect and not on some kind of personal agenda. I had to say this because you're assuming too many things about me. I have to admit that there is no connection between the Jewish God and the Sun God. Its a huge challenge for any theist to give reasonable explanations for these two seemingly disconnected religious traditions.

I believe in the Sun God, the one who emanated from the golden egg - Hiranyagarbha. He is a natural god not a sky god and I believe in him because I comprehend a lot about his mythology and studied it quite well. But I don't always defend him in my arguments. Sometimes I argue for the whole of religious thinking and sometimes I argue in favor of my personal beliefs.

And yet you didn't knew about this alternative possibility, you came to know about it only after I told you. Perhaps its time for you to read more about non-dualism and start understanding it correctly and you can always accuse me if whatever I had said is wrong. Just because things didn't go the way you intended to don't blame the discussion for that. Those were valid points and you failed to address them.

The doctrine of scientific realism says that objects like particles, atoms etc exist independent of the mind which is very opposite to the doctrine of non-dualism which says that empirical objects do not exist independent of the mind, it says empirical reality is a retrospective reality created by the mind and hence if scientific realism is found to be true then consciousness is a natural phenomena which can be explained by cognitive science and there is no place for unity in this kind of world. So just because metaphysical questions are undecidable it doesn't logically follow that the world is a unity or supports the view of non-dualism.

If scientific realism is found to be true then its the end of the story for the camp of non-dualists. I will be convinced that mysticism is a delusion and that metaphysical questions are meaningless.

You're trying to discuss about a thing which is inherently incomprehensible via dialectic or logic so obviously your posts about unity is incomprehensible to everyone and its a waste of time. The only thing we can discuss about it is to advice everyone not to discuss about it and you don't decide what my interests are. This time you went on to say that logic alone is a reliable process to testify certain theories and my main objection was against it. Theoretical knowledge is not true knowledge. A scientist might have radical new ideas to develop a antidote or a vaccine for an uncurable disease but if he doesn't puts his ideas to test to show everyone the number of people that he has saved through his discoveries and inventions then one cannot know whether his ideas are based on reality or based on a complete crap. So either you know about unity or you don't know. There is no such thing as 'I know theoretically' that's not knowing at all. That's not true understanding which implies that you're just preaching about unity without understanding what it is. If you don't know accept it don't pretend or claim that you know about it or say 'Its none of your business'. Without knowing what it is or knowing if it exists or not you've blindly asserted that the world is a unity, this is your way of doing philosophy, isn't it? If we let everyone to talk about unity without a criteria to test them with each one having their own theoretical notions about it then its more like following a blind path going straight into a deep well. I don't accept anyone's notions about unity without testing them or testing it on myself. Do you know what positive evidence is? Its making a prediction or a claim and demonstrating a phenomena empirically to support your claims. If you can't then why are you wasting your time discussing about it. It would be more useful and interesting if you bring some positive evidence for it than writing a new paper or a pile of books about it. Then can you please kindly show it. Yes, I have honestly admitted that I don't know about unity. You and your philosophers are the ones who are claiming that we know about unity and who are writing a pile of books about it and more importantly one cannot know about unity by reading books so ofcourse I don't understand when they talk about unity. I wonder whether they themselves understand it. No, that shows that you can't fairly address my criticisms. Yes, I did read your metaphysical theory, you started with a few premises and went on to make conclusions about the world based on those premises. I guess that's what other metaphysicians do. I am not a philosopher. I am just a layman. Those are not positive evidence for unity. Just because alternative doctrines are false doesn't mean that the doctrine of non-dualism is true by default. There can be other explanations as to why the world is the way it is.

The idea that animals can communicate with humans using languages which humans can comprehend is a normal belief in most religious traditions. I can even rationalize it and show that it is very much possible and that doesn't sound like an extraordinary claim to me, it is not so unlikely as you're portraying it. As far as David Berkowitz is concerned I don't know what his cult taught him and how much he pyschologically believed in it or did he used religious ideas to justify his killings. There is lot of difference between asking was David Berkowitz broken and asking are these religious ideas have any truth in them or not.