immortal

It is because your definition of sweetness is not in accordance with my definition of sweetness. To me qualia are non-physical, they have independent existence and therefore sweetness has non-physical existence, You're not sweetness because you exist even when you don't experience sweetness, you're existence but its outside of our universal room just like how some qualia can be outside of mary's room and this experience of existence is not stimulated by external stimuli of receptors so that the experience comes and goes after few seconds, you experience existence as long as you exist and you don't experience anything else or anyother qualia and therefore you are existence itself, a qualia which exists indepedently on its own. What attributes can a qualia have? It indeed exists, you experience it all the time.

They can't tell you that God is perfect if they haven't seen him in the first place, if they're saying that then its not true knowledge, its not true revealation. There is a lot of difference between a religious person who has seen God from a religous person who hasn't seen him. Perfect means knowing your true nature of being or existence. As you can see a perfect being cannot exist perfectly within a humanoid form, if you achieve perfection, i.e when you know your true nature, you'll no longer be confined to a humanoid form, you'll not have awareness of your body, the body will function on its own, it has got enough intelligence on its own, you don't have to be aware of your body, you don't have to remember what your name is, where your house is, how much debt you have, just no worries.

Yes science cannot know or will not know the ontological nature of space, time and matter because in order to know their nature of existence we need to access the quale of time, space and matter. I mean we need to experience their nature of existence just in the same way as we experience sweetness or redness. Now sweetness or redness is an universal, it is universal to everyone but as the thought experiment of Mary's room indicates that there can be other qualia outisde of mary's room which adds some knowledge to her previous existing knowledge of the world once she comes out of the room and has access to such a qualia. Similarly the hypothesis is that we are living in a universal room and we cannot know the nature of things as it "IS" as long as we're confined to this room and in order to know their exact nature we need to come out of our universal room and gain access to other qualia which exists outside our universal room just in the same way how mary come's out of her room. The point is that eastern school of philosophical thought had practical knowledge to come out of our universal room and had methods to access other knowledge of qualia outside of our universal room. Its not my field either. If it was, then I would indeed describe in detail what those methods are. I was educated based on the western school of philosophical thought. I learnt the Bohr atomic model and the hybridization of quantum orbitals of electrons which aids in the formation of molecules just as you did. If I was educated based on the eastern school of philosophical thought then I wouldn't have learnt these scientific models and there by couldn't have argued with you on similar grounds. We need to study the eastern school of philosophical thought if we ever want to have knowledge about qualia, the positivist approach will not provide us, it will ignore its importance and there by humanity will lose its knowledge. Qualia do represent some real knowledge. I didn't said that literally, I meant they occupied rich fertile lands and lived on some part of the earth. The kind of knowledge with which you can exercise your will and experience sweetness even if the substance stimulates receptors which are sensitive to the taste of bitter. That's the kind of practical knowledge what I am talking of. We have lost them and we'll lose them forever if we don't study the eastern school of philosophical thought. I meant if we had practical knowledge to manipulate and access new qualia i.e manipulate the actual physical world which I think is also made of only qualia then it will give rise to new possibilities and new ways of manipulating the physical nature for the use of our civilization and it will transform us in the process.

I only want a short answer from the scientific community because a lot will depend on the direction and content of my future posts in this site. I mean if the scientific community will not overcome their reductionist positivist approach and investigate on other methods of investigating the nature then I find that all my efforts is just vain. So the scientific community is not going to waste its time by invesitgating on other methods of investigating the nature unless someone else shows that there is a different method through which some real knowledge is being accumulated by using such a method. This is just a matter of responsiblity. If we have to evolve from a type 1 civilization to a type 2 or type 3 civilization then don't you think that we shouldn't just rely on genetic engineering to make us super humans. I mean shouldn't we preserve the knowledge of the great historical civilizations that ruled the earth once upon a time. We are preserving it only in our libraries in the form of books but we're not preserving the practical knowledge of those civilizations by clinging on to the positivist approach of science. So whose responsiblity is this?

Show where I have miss the mark. Neither you nor me know what unity is hence we cannot argue from that basis. However assuming that the universe is a unity to say that from this assumption there can be no true contradictions you need to first explain to me from where the plurality of this world comes from, even if we assume it is all produced only in our minds then you need to explain to me from where did the mind came from? If mind was not real then why am I not union with the unity, why am I unaware that I am "One". Therefore at some point there had to be a second to account for the origin of mind which makes us unware of the fact that we are "One". There lies the contradiction. Counter my argument.

I have replied to this post by quoting you in this thread --> http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/63509-scientism-and-how-this-worldview-affects-open-discussions-in-the-philosophy-and-religious-forums-threads/page__st__20__gopid__656214

OK http://dictionary.re...om/browse/sweet Though I'd be tempted to throw in something about the effect on certain receptor cells on the tongue of humans and (I think) most animals. Obviously it's also used metaphorically (love is sweet). And it's used to describe the pattern of electrical activity in the brain associated with the stimulation of sensors on the tongue. The main tenet of cognitive science is that it is irrelevant to map the mental processes of the mind to the molecular functions of the brain saying that the representations and patterns are quite enough to model or understand the emerging mental processes such as language processing, reasoning, behaviour, concept formation and attainment etc. The cognitive scientists use pattern recognition and fuzzy logic models used in neural networks or computational models to model or simulate the mental processes or patterns of the mind and it is hypothesized that the mind of a human is similar to the functioning of a neural network. There are many theories defending the functionalist approach and there is also a lot of criticisms against the functionalist approach using thought experiments and observational data as to how the humans solve problems or in problem solving. Therefore there is a lot of further research and evidence that should be shown to ensure that the reductionist approach of science is sufficient enough to answer all the questions in the cognitive sciences. Not really, the sensation of sweetness is a pattern of activity in the brain. That might be induced by sugar or it might be cross talk from an adjacent area of the brain. If the best example of one of the mysterious "qualia" that you can come up with is a neural wiring problem then I don't think they are that important. It is important and my #19 post in this thread addresses why it is important to investigate them. Its not fair to say that it is just fine. Cognitive science once again, I think you need to see M Descartes' work. Rene Descartes? He was the first great philosopher who looked into the problem of consciousness. It is true that no evil genuis could deceive you by making you to falsely believe that you existed but an evil genuis could easily make you falsely believe that you're the one who is thinking or that the thoughts on your mind are yours. Therefore it should have been "I exist, therefore I am", if we are not skeptical or if we are so certain that we are the one's who is thinking in our minds then we would have known whether free will exists or not. It is because of this skepticism that the problem of free will has existed right from the starting of philosophical thought. This is where the difference lies between eastern and western philosophical thought and among those philosophers. Eastern philosphers think that the genuis who is making us to believe that we are the one's who are thinking on our own is none other than your personal God itself. Your mind cannot think on its own, it needs direction and it comes from a genuis who directs your thought processes. This shows that God is beyond reason, he can be only known through experiential knowledge i.e by accessing the quale of God. Only if you know him then only you're certain of your reasoning and certain about the objective existence of the physical world independent of an observer. I think we need to reconsider the dualist approach towards the mind-body problem rather than holding on to the functionalist or the physicalist approach. However I don't fully appreciate the dualist view, if mind is found to be a non-physical entity then everything that is real is non-physical in nature and therefore the physical brain only appears as a perception in our minds but our senses might actually be made up of non-physical entities and that's how a non-physical entities interact with each other rather than a mind causing motions in the body by moving a small part of the brain which sounds really absurd with the advancement in brain research. On slightly closer introspection (or just copying M. Descartes) I will find that it's my mind I'm referring to, rather than my body. I have clearly shown you that you cannot be certain that you're the one who is thinking on your own and hence it still needs further close introspection showing that the "I" is not refering to your mind or even your body, it is refering to something else which we don't know and hence it is so important to know thyself and once you know yourself you'll know that you can exist seperately from your mind and your body. You're existence itself. You're qualia itself.

He has adressed them. This is his reasoning for an earth older than the sun. As for the origin of diversity of life is concerned he agrees that there are very strong disagreements between the description given by evolution by natural selection and the description given in Genesis as to how they originated and he mainly deals with the timeline of fossil evidence and the timeline given in Genesis and he says that they are in good accordance with each other. Sorry for the inconvenience, infact I was the one who uploaded it to google docs and I have shared it to "any who has the link" restriction access and you should be able to access it. Its strange.

The Genesis One Code by Daniel Friedmann Daniel Friedmann in his book TheGenesisOneCode shows how there is no conflict in the origin of the universe between the 6 creation days as described in Genesis(6000 years of Biblical time) and 13.7 billion years as described in the scientific Big Bang model. His associates mailed me to review his book as I was a book blogger and I thought of posting in Book Talk forum or in the Contradictions: Religion vs Science thread but since this was still at the speculation stage I thought it was better to post it here. His extensive studies in the Oral Law of Torah consisting of Talmud and Zohar which is a group of mystical works also known as Kabbalah shows that there are three timeline events namely the creation time, divine time and the human time and more interestingly the cosmic Sabbatical cycles of 49000 years gives us a conversion factor so that we can convert human time to divine time as well as creation time showing how the events in Genesis is compatible with the origin of human beings around 5 thousand years ago in an universe which is 13.7 billion years old. Through out human history and across wide mystical traditions mystics have often claimed that almost half a month would have passed in the natural world while they're in the spiritual realm of God even for a few minutes. This shows that there is a difference between the human perception of time and the actual physical divine time. Religious scriptural texts should be falsified through revealations and not via empirical scientific evidence. Now only one view can be right both science as well as mysticism cannot claim that they can give the knowledge of the ontological nature of space, time and matter. To know more read the book by following the link. (edit: link changed due to problems from other members and also taking note of the publisher rights)

I have replied to this post in this thread http://www.sciencefo...__gopid__655548 since I had to say the same thing by quoting your posts in both the threads.

Mystical experiences are irrational, yes it solves metaphysical problems but it also simultaneously creates a lot of problems in the metaphysical realm and hence only one explanation of everything cannot be correct. Reality is not something how you want it to be, reality is what it is. If you're not going to change your views in anyway even after showing why you were wrong then why do you want to discuss these things in the first place. I have made an objection to your posts why don't you address them rather than taking it personal. Your mind-reading approach is too annoying even for members who are tolerant enough to listen to other person's views and opinions, who display patience and civility in discussions. Do you really think that there were no monotheistic mystics in monotheistic religion? Do you think that the Appolo priests of the Greeks didn't have knowledge about Appolo? Do you think mayans and native americans didn't have knowledge about their gods? Do you think few Buddhists won't communicate with Buddha in personal form? Mysticism doesn't mean the death of Gods, mysticism means the return of Gods. Your view that experiences of personal God(s) by mystics as just misinterpretations is completely wrong. Mayans, their rituals and their precession calendar. Spiritualism of Native Indians St. Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) was a christian mystic, in her autobiography she has documented her experience of a trip to hell and other profound mystical experiences. The link provides similar experiences by other christian mystics. So how can you conclude that the father of Jesus do not exist? Do you really think that you can understand the mystical experience of a trip to hell through logic? This is the reason why I advice you to abandon all rational thinking when it comes to mysticism. Its a waste of time for metaphysicians to understand mysticism through logic. It is these kind of experiences like the trip to hell experienced by mystics in parallel traditions and the fresh fragrance which comes out of the bodies of mystics across many traditions brings me closer to mysticism, not the logical explanations given by metaphysicians, blind scholars and blind philosophers. But does not the definition of 'quale' means that it requires a mind to exist? The word was invented to describe a mental phenomenon. How can a mental phenomenon be fundamental? No, the definition of quale can be extended to phenomenon happening outside of one's mind. If you have a phenomena in which you can see your own mind then it means mind itself is a quale. Qualia can be extended to describe non-mental phenomena too and its not something confined only to the mind. I think it cannot be put more simple than this, Jiva is the seer and by adopting the methodology of avastatreya you can see your own mind, only then you're called as a true philosopher and you'll recieve the priveledge to study the different schools of philosophical thought. Oh. Okay. Maybe we don't disagree so much after all. You're the one who is not agreeing by saying that mystics who choose the path of personal God only experience misinterpretations of a personal God, their interpretations of a personal God are so perfect that they even tell what ornaments the God(s) is/are wearing. You're view towards theistic mysticism is wrong or you were misinformed. . Yes. But it is consistent with metaphysics and solves metaphysical problems. The Dalai Lama advises 'Anything that contradicts logic or experience should be abandoned'. and metaphysics is the best place to see what would and would not contradict logic. Of course, in the end metaphysics is a waste of time, but it is a useful ladder, and indespensible for someone wanting to test the doctrine against the facts, maybe before they dive into the practice. This is presumably why Nagarjuna took the trouble to lay out the metaphysical basis of Buddhist cosmology. People often point to Zen practice as an argument against the need for metaphysics, but at least one patriarch of Zen was a good metaphysician and gives the logical basis for the practice. Not necessary, no, but extremely useful. In metaphysics one can prove that the doctrine of mysticism is the only one that leads to no contradictions. There are so many schools of philosophical thought in Buddhism as well as in The Uttara Mimamsa of Upanishads such that each of their philosophy sounds great or seems to be right and in order to know which view is the right one, we need to experience the nature of things ourselves, metaphysics will not solve the problem or gives you the answer. I'm arguing for the veracity of these experiences. It's just that I wouldn't expect appeals to first-person experience to be taken seriously here. If you ask me what I gain from my experience, it would be, among other things, the veracity of my views about metaphysics. I don't know what your metaphysical views are but you seem to have a bias towards non-theistic mystical experiences and against theistic mystical experiences. That's double standards, mysticism is not something spoken only by intelligent people, it is spoken by men of God. This is wrong. Metaphysics led me like an arrow to Buddhism. Again there are so many views in Buddhism itself which contradicts each others views, so you have to get into the field to know which view is right without doing that it will take you nowhere. Not sure what this means. I'm a fan of Kant. He used metaphysics to show that world is as Lao Tsu says it is. In his view both the basis of the intellect and of the world itself is a phenomenon that is not an instance fo a category. He left it to Hegel to name this a 'spritual unity'. From this comes Bradley's 'Absolute Idealism', which is an endorsement of Nagarjuna's Middle Way doctrine and the 'advaita' doctrine of the late Upanishads etc. If you have any thoughts in your mind that the mysticism or even the spiritual unity spoken by Advaita and by other mystics works on this above dictum then my humble opinion to you is that you better abandon all your rational thinking when analysing unity spoken in Upanishads because one cannot understand it through reason, its beyond reason and it doesn't work in a rational way, this is the advice given in scriptures. For your curiosity Hegel's dictum can partially work up to the creative ego as postulated by Johann Gottlieb Fichte, in Upanishads this creative ego is none other than the personal God itself and this creative ego(or personal God or personal ego) exists in every living thing and he is the same creative ego which is also the universal or absolute ego from which all objective reality is derived. One can think rationally upto here but you cannot go beyond that, one has to take the Absolute idealism of Bradley to know the absolute through mystical experience. So I think the work of Johann Gottlieb Fichte should recieve a reconsideration. To me the absolute of Bradley and the creative ego of Fichte both are important in creating the aspects of reality that we see. That's what I am saying in your own metaphysician's terms. We cannot borrow knoweldge, as they say in Zen. What we read in books is relative knowledge. It might be utter nonsense. True knowledge is identical with its object, and this is an axiom for mysticism. It does not come from books or from other people. Do we not agree even about this? Yes I do agree with this one. I do realize that mysticism plays an important part in metaphysics and solves most of the problems but I have serious doubts of whether there is an one-to-one correspondance between the rationality of metaphysicians and experiential knowledge of mystics, that is what my concern is. Perhaps it is better to resort to transcendental Idealism of Kant which will be the final ultimate universal knowledge of the objective as well as the subjective world. If you have reached the point of knowledge of the creative ego of Fichte the next step would be to have the knowledge of the Transcendental self, the true precondition eternal knowledge of the nature of things. Yes. That's my problem. You are claiming that Buddhist doctrine is false. I never claimed that, I just said that the non-dual of Advaita by Sankara contradict some of the Buddhist views about reality, for him the objective world has relative and empirical existence where as for buddhists the world doesn't exist, its illusory. Buddhists neither claim that unity exists nor they say that it doesn't exist where as for Sankara he is certain that unity exists and also he approves the existence of personal God(s). I don't know what is your view on this, you seem to often quote from buddhism as well as from advaita, I just said that they don't hold similar views. To claim that there are two real phenomenon is dualism, not mysticism. I suppose you would say otherwise, and may believe that 'The Philosophy of the Upanishads' by Professor Radhkrishnan is by a blind author. But I think he's got it right. Dualism is false or mysticism is nonsense. First of all your defintion of mysticism is so improper such that I don't know what you mean by mysticism then. The Upanishads itself have so many schools of phylosophical thought or interpretations such as Dvaita(dualism) by Madhavacharya, Advaita(non-dualism) by Sankara, Vishishtadvaita(qualified monism) by Ramanujarcharya, Shuddhadvaita(pure monism) by Vallabhacharya, they all interpret the relationship between Jiva (the individual self), Ishvara(the personal God or creative ego) and Absolute self(Brahman). All these schools of philosphical thought comes under the one roof of mysticism. You've misunderstood so many things that I can't really interpret what you're saying when you say "Dualism is false or mysticism is nonsense". Even Dualists are mystics, what's wrong with you. Your argument against my view can be put into the tone of this author, isn't it? Now do you realize why the knowledge of a personal God or Isvara or creative ego is so much important in the non-dual of Advaita Vedanta.? Sankara accepted that Saguna Brahman (i.e the absolute with attributes) exist and therefore he accepted that personal God too was eternal, undecaying and real and this is the view which I hold on to. If it doesn't convince you logically then no problem it doesn't convince me logically either but I go by experience and not logic.

Sweet molecules? Molecules are not sweet. What molecules do is that they attach themselves with receptor proteins present in cells of the sense organs or at specific binding sites and there by inducing a conformational change in the specific receptor protein which will aid in the opening of ion gates and there by igniting an action potential which will take the input signal through the neurological pathways for higher processing at synaptic junctions. The input signals are weighted and a new output signal is fired from a neuron and it will pass through the motor neurons which will contract and relax the actin and myosin filaments in the muscles helping us to talk, walk and type the keys of our keyboard. Can you tell me where the processing of sweetness is being done here? When someone asks me, "How was the cookie, immortal?" I will reply as "Yes, it was sweet and delicious". From where I am getting this extra bit of knowledge of sweetness?, I care and why the hell I am experiencing sweetness, why doesn't it all go in the dark as Chalmers argues. Therefore if science cannot explain it then the knowledge given by science is incomplete. It's not fine at all. Not yet, but they are working on it. Unless you can show that they will not and can not succeed you have not answered my question. According to the positivist approach of science what scientific models map is the phenomena of things, what this means is that science is not mapping the actual physical world or the main objective world what science is mapping is the Kantian categories and their mathematical relationships that exist only in our minds and all our observations agree because those categories are universals. What knowledge is complete if it doesn't give us a way to know the nature of the physical system which we are investigating in. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is not a basic rule of the objective world, it is an another limitation on the relationships of categories in our minds, it is not a problem of nature and hence if we really have to know the nature of existence of physical time, physical space and physical matter then we need to map the actual physical world. This is the reason why I insisted that our positivist approach cannot give us a complete understanding of the world around us. We can only map the actual physical or the objective world if and only if we come out of the mary's room which we all are subjected to and access new quale of knowledge. i.e the quale of physical time, space and matter. Science's best use is to answer questions like "what time it is now" but it fails miserably to answer questions like What time IS? or What space IS? what is their basic stuff? Is there a one to one correspondance between the world of phenomena as it appears and the world of noumena the things in themselves? As ydoaps clearly mentioned all scientific knowledge is based on the sense organs and if you don't come out of the mary's room then science will never ever know the ontological nature of time, space and matter. That seems to be self defeating. If you don't hold that all things are amenable to investigation then you don't investigate them. If you don't investigate then you don't find the explanations. I am not saying that science should give up investigation, what I am saying is that science should look into the world of qualia rather than smashing atoms in huge particle accelerators, it should shift its scope of investigation. There are a lot of things which require a new way of thinking and I have already given you some fair points, also why is that humans have the ability to solve problems for which no algorithm exists, if Brain is an analog computer then there is no way it could solve such problems. We need new way of thinking, we need new science.

If qualia can exist independently outside of mind then they are fundamental, real and exist as they are. If you have knowledge of the quale of mind itself and if you can percieve mind through Jiva then it shows that mind itself is a quale and not something which is confined within one's mind. What you're talking about is just transcending outside of mind and knowing the absolute and I don't stop at God, I know there is an another step. Its like you want to directly fly from above and see the land where as I want to take the sea route and arrive at the sea shore. To me the knowledge of a personal God as well as the knowledge of absolute is important. I choose this path. Are you talking about the Dwasuparna Shruti? Two birds sitting on the branch of a tree ... that one or is this something different. Mysticism is not metaphysics. Mysticism provides a method to experience the claims that it asserts and hence it neither falls to the boundary of science nor to the umbrella of metaphysics. I don't agree with you yet and you have not addressed my points in my previous posts and you don't seem to understand my views and please don't predict what's on my mind and assert what I seem to be thinking, you cannot speculate on what's going on my mind, if you didn't understand please ask I will repeat it hundred times but please don't assert claims which I am not making. Our disagreements are understandable because you're arguing from metaphysics but I am arguing from mystical experiences or mystics who have had direct experiences of the nature of things, that's the main difference. Mystics are the true philosophers because they're the one's who truly make things done, they give us the methods and even guide us to percieve our own minds and only such kind of empiricism can add some knowledge to the already existent huge body of knowledge for humanity. Metaphysics will take you nowhere. Kant has really shown that we need rationalism as well as empiricism if it has to be accountable as real knowledge. You're reading literature from blind philosphers who haven't seen the light, they will just argue it will be like this or it will be like that but it is the literature of mystics which will help us to have great insights into the knowledge of God and the absolute, the exact nature of things and how to achieve that knowledge by ourselve and hence such a knowledge is real because it can be passed on to others. I am not endorsing the Middle way view of Nagarjuna at all. Infact I am arguing that personal God and the absolute both exist and they both are as fundamental as they are real.

There are methods to percieve your own mind and that would make mind itself as a qualia, such a method is called as Avastratreya (Avaste- means states like awake, deep sleep and dream states and these states are represented by the mind). Jiva is the thing which is subjected to experience such states and if you gain the ability to percieve things through Jiva then you can percieve your own mind. Only those who have this ability are called as true philosophers because only they will know the true nature of things as they really are and he will not speculate that it might be like this or it might be like that. Only such persons have the liberty to study the different school of Darshan Shastras.

Hehe!! Its okay, you're not the only one who go through such an annoying situation, earlier I requested to provide such a facility to save our posts before we post them like in blogger but I don't know whether such a thing is feasible or not, that's why I write my posts first in my text editor, save it and then paste it here, you need to adapt to SFN, I have been here for a while and I know how that feels, its okay, you can quote me when you have time, take your own time.

Mysticism is not book knowledge, it is the body of knowledge accumulated by mystics who have had mystical experiences and quite amazingly they all come to the same conclusion. I am going with the above definition. That is a too narrow defintion of mysticism and more importantly only qualia are real and personal God as a form and the absolute both are quale. If you say God is a quale and not fundamental then you have to also admit that you're not fundamental because the self is a quale and one who have self knowledge say that self is fundamental and therefore even God as a form is fundamental. You need to wake up and make a choice, you seem to accept the absolute and call yourself atheist, you're doing injustice to yourself, you seem weird, one has to speak the truth and not hide it, just because non-theistic mysticism eliminates God from reality and upholds the atheistic mindset, it doesn't mean that theistic mysticism is false. God as a person is as fundamental as the absolute. Reality is not something which you choose to portray it as, Reality is what it is. The reality given by Tao and Buddhism is only one view of the fundamental reality. There are many schools of philosophy which accept God as a person and also accept reality of the absolute spoken in Tao and Buddhism. Therefore arguing for God as a person or arguing for God as absolute deserves same treatment, it doesn't make the non-theistic mystics any more great than what they are. My below argument shows why self knowledge is not different from the knowledge of qualia. If you're a quale then you and your knowledge of yourself is inseperable from it. For a beautiful analogy when you have knowledge of sweetness you know that you're not sweetness itself because you exist even when you don't have the knowledge (or even when you don't have the experience) of sweetness but this is not what happens in self knowledge, your knowledge of yourself is eternal and it exists as long as you exist and therefore the knowledge of quale of self is not seperate from you i.e to say you're a quale. This is the definition of what an experience of quale is. The experience of Self or Self experience has the four above properties, if you say that it is different from qualia then you need to show how self experience is different from the experience of qualia. What happens in Self knowledge is that you are a quale and hence such a knowledge is ineffable (can not be described in words) and this is the reason why the seers of upanishads advice us not to speak or argue of its true nature. Sweetness is a quale and you know what sweetness is but you cannot put it into words, in the same way when you know yourself you know what self is but you cannot put it into words and describe yourself. Tao and especially Buddhism believe in sunyata, nihilism or void. Buddhists neither say that unity is one and it exists nor do they say that it doesn't exist. The founder of Advaita, Shankara who followed the philosophy of Gaudapada who was also a Buddhist is certain that unity exists, he didn't accepted the void or sunya which was held by his master Gaudapada. You have to make a choice and take a stand on which school of philosophical thought you belong to, there are differences in these school of philosophical thought, you seem to quote often from Buddhism, Tao, Advaita and even the Jesus of Hammadi gnostics, this is the reason I insist you to have a stand on which school of philosophical thought you adhere yourself too. You cannot argue in favour of all these and claim yourself as an atheist. Sankara of Advaita himself agress on Saguna Brahman Saguna brahman (lit. "The Absolute with qualities"[1]) came from the Sanskrit saguṇa (सगुण) "with qualities" and Brahman (ब्रह्मन्) "The Absolute". as well as the Nirguna brahman (Devanagari निर्गुण ब्रह्म, nirguṇa brahman, the supreme reality without form, quality, attribute) Hiranyagarbha is the God of the Gods, you knock him out of the picture or out of the body of mystical knowledge then you're knocking out Upanishads and the Vedas from the umbrella of mysticism. I quoted this excerpt in the beginning itself when I first started discussing these concepts with you but you ignored it, I hope you don't ignore it now. When you're experiencing yourself there will be no mind, mind would have dissolved in you. If you say that unity is one and not without a second then you need to explain to me from where did the mind came from? It has to have a basis and therefore there is the need for the Absolute with qualities or forms and also a God and they all have to be a quale because if it isn't then you need to explain how non physical entity like a quale can interact with a physical entity and even an immaterial entity like the self which you think is not a quale. Therefore everything is the interaction of quale and it is fundamental and real. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This shows that what is important is the final actual result and God knows that the final actual result is GOOD and therefore untill we can know whether the final outcome was evil or good we cannot disprove his existence with the problem of evil. Infact I will get through the suffering and the evil in this world as the work of God because God ensures that the outcome is Good which makes me elated with joy.

Its because you seem to have a narrow definition of mysticism, you are only interested in the absolute and you have a bias over religions and schools of philosophy who argue that personal God exists where as I accept both the absolute as well as the personal God(s). No, one can know oneself without knowing God, if you're not interested in God(s) then they won't appear to you but that doesn't mean they don't exist because ones who are interested claim that he exists. Yes we are Gods, made in the image of God. Psalm 82:6 - I said, "You are gods, all of you are sons of the Most High". God is a quale, if you have access to this quale then you can experience him just as you experience sweetness, redness and other qualitative attributes. Just because some mystics or Buddhists didn't had access to that quale doesn't mean he doesn't exist. God is a person and also he is absolute. Or it happened in the former only because it happened in the latter. No, no, you've misunderstood my argument, actually my argument is like it happened in the latter (Big Bang of science in our percievable minds) only because it happened in the former(creation of the world by God in the actual physical world i.e the thing in itself). What I mean to say is that when God said "Let there be Light and there was Light" he is talking about the noumenon or the thing in itself but we misunderstand him thinking that he is talking about the phenomena or the world of sense organs, my argument is that the actual physical world or the thing in itself is made up of only five elements that is Earth, water, fire, air and space. Natural sciences is defined as the knowledge which is gained only through the sense organs and Tao and God are the kind of knowledge which doesn't come through the sense organs, it is either intuitive knowledge or experiential knowledge (knowledge of qualia) and hence God and Tao cannot be reduced to the natural world. If you had really studied the standard model of particle physics, the model of quantum physics and the model of General Relativity and Special Relativity then you would appreciate the fact that how much scientific models accurately predict the events of this universe and there is no discrepancy between the predictions made by those scientific theories and the events observed in the laboratories and therefore the universe is not so much of a miracle to scientists, the problem is with the interpretation of such models and this is a philosophical problem and what can be changed is the way we interpret things or the way we percieve things, so even if I come up with an evidence of a miracle or God its not going change those scientifc models in any way, what's going to change is the way we percieve things that's all.

It is interesting to note that gnostics from different parts of the world, all have come to the same conclusion that sin and evil is only apparent and doesn't exist as such. The philosophy behind such thinking is that sin exists as long as you think that you're performing your own actions, once you think that I am something else which is my true nature and all my actions are done by a personal God then neither will you be proud of what you achieve and nor will you weep when you do something wrong and since you're not the root cause of your actions you're not attributed to make sins and hence sins don't exist. As long as God makes you to experience the world in the frame of time and space you will not know your true nature and hence Moral perfection cannot be achieved, the important point is even if you achieve Moral Perfection and has no evil inside you, you cannot avoid evil in this world because according to Einstein's Special theory of relativity all events are always happening, our notion of a past, present and a future time is only apparent, we don't have free will and hence whatever has to happen it has to happen, we're mere spectators however God gives you way to escape the experience of suffering by helping us to know our true nature, then you're free and you can do noble deeds with such knowledge. Yes, that "One" who has recognised in another and himself in his own true being has achieved Moral Perfection and such an individual can guide other men to achieve Moral Perfection and make us escape from this suffering, he cannot intervene and turn this earth into heaven because that will neither prevent evil on earth nor it will make us Morally Perfect. I do realize that I have used circular argument and hence it cannot constitute as a proof. When I make an assertion like this one "God is not seperate from nature, he himself is manifested in different forms in the process of creation." it is purely a metaphysical statement. Neither I am saying that God could have produced this universe using the Big Bang nor that he created the diversity of life that we see in the biosphere using DNA, RNA and proteins, such an argument would seem ridiculous but I'm not trying to introduce God into scientific models. If science didn't had any gaps in its knowledge then I would definitely not be arguing on this side and holding this view, I think what will change is the way we percieve things, my view will not going to change our scientific models or deny their credibility in any way i.e my point is that either Big Bang happened in the external world or Big Bang happened only in our percievable minds, as you can see this is a philosophical problem and Science can solve this problem if its reductionist and positivist approach can reduce all phenomena to the natural world but it has not done that yet and that's the reason I am requesting for metaphysical speculation. If you open religion and philosophy forums and endorse only your view then I am sorry, I can't get along. God belongs to the metaphysical realm and therefore one can not make predictions so that we can falsify his existence and any arguments against his existence are not strong enough either. If you still insist that I have to show you a miraculous phenomena that proves that some real knowledge has been gained by a theist showing that God is real then I will not assert or make metaphysical speculation of God in this site again.

No, we need to agree on the definition of Moral perfection, the main aim of all religions is to guide humans to know the infinite, which is our true nature, that's the final ultimate goal and it is the highest level of Moral Perfection and without achieving it there will always be some kind of evil inherent in all of us. You didn't understood my argument God cannot give the gift of moral perfection to everyone because if we does then everyone will know their true divine nature and everyone will escape from the forces of nature present on earth and there will be no one to experience the events happening on the earth to see his prophecies coming true. He will give you that moral perfection when he has made you prepared for it.

Yes I do accept the fact that Kin selection or inclusive fitness and reciprocal altruism can account for the altruistic behaviours displayed by social animals and humans are indeed social animals no matter how high their level of intelligence and advanced their cultures are. It seems to me that humans are something special and inherently different when it comes to evading the logical choice of the pre-programmed behaviours in the Brain and to choose a different set of altruistic behaviours which are performed only to please a higher authority which doesn't provide any help in the increase of reproductive fitness of its individuals who display such behaviours and I believe this mainly due to our higher level of intelligence which helps us to question our very own existence and to come out of a simulation simulated by the selfish genes in the Brain. This interesting article Touching plants in the field shows that even plants and animals might have feelings and have an inner anthropomorphic subjective life which can be questionable but they don't have enough intelligence to question their very own existence. It is because the two major forces natural selection and cultural evolution can only account for behaviours which can evolve and passed on to future generations because they provided or aided in the increase of our reproductive fitness and it is for that reason those memes and genes are respectively accumulated and thrives in the meme and the gene pools but the problem is there are specific memes in the meme pool which have existed for thousands of years which doesn't offer reproductive value in any way and yet cultural evolution has failed to keep a check on it. Unfortunately we don't have complete answers as to how the three Big Bangs(Existence, Life, Self-Awareness) happened and the answers to those questions will drastically change our worldviews and the way we define "humane" behaviours. That's the point I was making. To know which morals are better for our society we need a complete understanding of the world around us and there will always be room for improvement, this was the important point which should have been discussed in the relevant thread but I was disappointed with the direction that thread took starting from its first few replies. Here is an interesting article Are Humans still evolving? which shows how environmental and genetic factors affect reproductive fitness in women. Interestingly it is found out that Roman Catholic women have 20% higher reproductive fitness compared to women of other religions and it was found out that university women had lesser reproductive fitness. Therefore I do acknowledge the role of religions in increasing the reproductive fitness of humans but once those ideological religious motivations are taken very seriously that's where the problem begins, for example:- some women might be determined that they're going to remain as virgin through out their life just because they feel that the proposal of their mate didn't come from a divine God. It is these kind of ideological motivations or memes which are learnt by members in a society which hinder their reproductive fitness and they are many examples similar to the above one. This is where the problem lies, it does matter from where the source of humane, "Real," altruistic or good behaviours emerge from because the choice or the decision that I will take in a particular situation will depend on whether our morals were pre-programmed by selfish genes so that I will choose to act in a way which will increase my inclusive fitness or I will completely behave with a conscious non-selfish intent to perform an act which pleases God or a higher authority and not an act to please anyone else or to please other people who make judgements upon me. Atheists and theists choose to behave differently on specific circumstances. Just like there are no absolute universal bad genes there is no such thing as good universal morals or bad universal morals, for example:- It is wrong for Jews to perform Idol worship and they have to worship only one God where as Hindus can worship thousands of God. Therefore morals are not defined by humans. Morals are set up and given by God which should be followed in a particular place or country, on specific circumstances and in a particluar point in time. Whether you place your actions based on a moral system given by a higher authority or you go by your own moral system or a moral system given by the government is left to you.

If Consciousness is found to be a fundamental property or a main constituent of the universe then there is no such thing as physical, everything that exists will be a qualia and only they are real and the world is brought about by the interaction of these non-physical qualia and not by interaction between a non-physical entity and a physical quantity. What I mean to say is that the world of science and its models only exist and models our perceptions in our minds and mass, charge, position, space, time and other categories are ideological concepts that exist in our minds and not in the external physical world. A better way to comprehend this is the distinction of phenomenon and noumenon as formulated by Immanuel Kant. However Kant was not aware that we can access new qualia and gain new knowledge about the metaphysical entities and hence he rejected metaphysics completely saying that such a metaphysical knowledge was impossible because he believed all knowledge had to come only through the sense organs and what I am arguing is that there are speicifc methods through which we can access new qualia and gain experiential knowledge such a God, exact nature of time, space and matter and even soul. Therefore only qualia are real.

The Problem of Evil 1. God is not seperate from nature, he himself is manifested in different forms in the process of creation. 2. Therefore if God exists then this world has to exist and if this world has to exist there must be someone to experience its existence. 3. If there is someone to experience its existence then he cannot access to know his own true nature(divine nature) because once he knows his true nature he will escape from the forces of nature and he will never be subjected to the forces of nature again. We lose a participator in our participitory universe. 4. If he cannot know his true nature then he will inevitably have desires. 5. If he has desires then he will inevitably have some kind of evil in him. Hence a morally perfect God cannot create this world and simultaneously achieve the ultimate moral perfection required to eliminate all evil in this world and therefore evil persists in this world at different scales. He knew his act of creation will also lead to the origin of evil in this world and yet he choose to perform his action or his will because he can give us the power to eliminate the evil within one's self and hence his act of creation and the existence of evil is justifiable. God has the power to eliminate all evil, only he can give us the moral perfection that is required to eliminate the different scales of evil with in us and hence he is omniscient. God knew that evil will originate and persist in this world if he created or manifested himself to produce this world, he isn't ignorant and hence he is omnipotent. God has the desire to induce a desire in individuals making them to seek him and there by giving them the divine grace to achieve the ultimate moral perfection, in this way one by one in this world will eliminate all evil from within if you like it or not. This conclusion is false, moral perfection means to know one's own true nature i.e to become identical to a morally perfect God. Evil of different scales will persist in this world but God is changing people's minds many are realizing and feeling guilty for killing innocent people and they are giving up their ideologies and their arms. What is the purpose of so many self-realization centers in the world, what purpose are they serving, they serve only one purpose to achieve ultimate moral perfection. We can infer and conclude that God exists from the same observable world.

I think we are at the precipice where the conflicts between science and religion has reached a tipping point with two clear distinct contradictory worldviews and there is scope for only one worldview, either science reduces the phenomena of consciousness and every other phenomena using its reductionist approach or consciousness will turn out be the main constituent part of the universe requiring non-physical entities which means that science and scientific models will be a sub-case just like how Newtons Laws of Motion emerges as a sub-case of Einstein's General theory of Relativity. I don't want to have any bias towards only one worldview and completely rejecting the other., I am quite happy which ever worldview wins out in the end but its very important to educate people about the worldviews and arguments held by people who are on the other side against your worldview. Professor reveals why we believe in God(s) I would be very delighted if professor Andy Thomsan could model the experiences and psychology of mystics rather than attacking religion which is not the main cause of the problem or the main reason for why people believe in a God. True theists don't believe in God just because other people believe in God, they don't believe in God just for the sake that they want to believe in God, they believe in God because they have experiential knowledge of God, that's where the main problem is, that's what evolutionary psychology has to model and not give a set of mechanisms which shows why we are vulnerable to believe in God(s), the problem and the issue is quite at large. The question is very clear is it From science to God or from God to science. From Science to God - Peter Russell Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff tried desperately to reduce the concept of qualia using microtubules, Objective Reduction of wavefunction and the twistor theory but it doesn't solve the hard-problem of consciousness. To know in which way Brain research is heading this seems to be very good link - Beyond the Brain - National Geographic As for synasthesia, all that neurologists can do is put those individuals in a MRI scan and detect which parts of the Brain are under activity but they cannot give the biochemistry mechanism to produce such experiences of tastes. For example blind people understand and process language by touching the words through their fingers amazingly even the visual-cortex area of the brain is found to show some activity even though it doesn't recieve any sensory information through one's eyes but this is not enough to show colours to blind people and hence they lack such knowledge and their understanding is incomplete. Can science simulate the subjective experience of tastes, pain and other qualia using a neural network as neural network is designed based on the model of Brain or does it end up in creating philosophical zombies who don't feel anything internally.? Can science explain the ontological nature of time, space and matter which seems to have much relevance as we penetrate more into the depths of nature? With out such an explanation the knowledge given by science is incomplete. It is better for science not to make claims for which it cannot give credible answers. Scientists can hold on to scientism once they've answered all questions but not before that and there should be room for new ways of thinking about this world. Only time will decide which worldviews will eventually die and which will succeed, the light will illuminate their minds.

Good question. Yes there is something that science will never be able to explain it is called as Qualia(Universals). Qualia are aspects of our perception that don't exist in the external world, for example:- Colours, tastes, pain etc. In this following link Mapping pain in Brain the neurologists often use the word processing of pain but such an understanding of pain is incomplete, if they have such an authority over the complete understanding of the processing of pain then they should be able to understand the quantitative as well as the qualitative aspects of pain. What do I mean by qualitative aspects of pain is that neurologists should be able to compeletely understand and simulate the mechanisms that causes the subjective experience of pain, if they have such a complete understanding of the experience of pain then we can use the same mechanisms that are used in the cognitive processing of the Brain to be simulated in neural networks and enabling even machines to have subjective emotional experiences rather than just creating philosophical zombies which mimic human behaviours but will not have an inner life of their own. The point is our current understanding of Brain biochemistry doesn't provide any mechanisms what so ever to simulate the qualitative aspects of pain and other similar subjective experiences. This forms the hard-problem of consciousness as formulated by David Chalmers. Therefore the cognitive processing of the Brain is not enough to account for the subjective experiences such as pain, redness, sweetness etc and these are the things which exist seperately and independently from the physical objects and individuals who suffer from Lexical --> Gustatory Synesthesia are a perfect evidence that they arise from some form of cognitive processing and the point is that we need to understand the processing of these qualia which are non-physical in nature and only such a complete understanding of the cognitive processing in the Brain as well as the processing of qualia will give us a better understanding to solve the easy as well as the hard problems of cognitive processes of consciousness. It seems to me that the different pathways of neurons that exist for different forms of pain indicates that the non-physical qualia have a casual effect on the physical world and it seems as though these neuronal pathways are just amplifiers to experience different forms and varieties of qualia. The Knowledge argumentof qualia use a thought experiment called as Mary's room which indicates qualia represent some real knowledge and we need to have this knowledge in order to understand the complete cognitive processing of how the brain generates specific replies to specific sensory inputs. The positivist approach of Copenhagen Interpretation developed by Neils Bohr which is followed by majority of the orthodox physicists and the violation of the Bell's inequality theorem forces us to develop a different intuitive way of looking at reality. We are forced to believe that particles will not always have pre-determined values to physical quantities or attributes and the consequence of such a thinking leads us not to believe that particles will have attributes such a position, momentum, polarisation(in the case of a photon) untill the particle is measured or observed through a detector extracting or accessing the precise information or the value of a physical attribute and more importantly this act of knowing or measuring will change the possible values that can be assigned to a quantum system destroying the delicate pattern of interference and Bohr was of the intention that we are not changing the physical nature of the quantum system, what we change is only the possible values that can be assigned to a quantum system. This leads us to be skeptical as to what a scientific theory models. Does it really model the external physical world or Does it model only our perceptions or observations which are processed in our minds i.e Does our mathematical models describe an apple or a tossed coin falling in the external physical world or Does the mathematical models describe the relationships of cause and effect of mental entities which process sensory inputs through photons and makes us to percieve an apple appearing to fall down on the ground of the earth? Does it map the external physical world or does it map our perceptions and observations processed in our minds? I mean to say if positivism forces us to believe that a particle can be seperated from its actual physical nature from its measurable physical quantities such as position, momentum and polarisation, what understanding we really have about a particle, what it "is" physically? Does it mean that position, momentum, polarisation, mass, charge, spin etc are quantitative qualia which exist seperately and independently from physical objects and exist only in our minds? If we can all experience the qualia of sweetness when we taste sugar and consider that the qualia sweetness is an universal what would prevent us to assert that even the mass and position of sugar molecules are an experience of a qualia which is universal to all of us. If this is the case then the question of why the act of measurement changes the quantum system in such a way that it is impossible to simultaneously detect the precise information of position of a wavicle and also to observe the delicate interference being formed on the screen is not a problem of nature it is more of a problem of processes of perception in the mind. A limitation on the mathematical relationships of position and momentum quale processing during the processing of perception in the mind of a subjective observer. Below experiment shows that Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and the Bohr's argument that the detector induces random kicks to the electrons which causes the interference pattern to be destroyed cannot account for such a phenomena we need a new perspective to it. http://www.daviddarl...tanglement.html This shows that there is a clear gap in the understanding of our nature and that gap is due to our lack of knowledge about the qualia, since it is non-physical, science and its current positivist approach will never be able to understand the qualia and hence an appeal to scientific authority can be rised when scientists hold on to scientism preventing free thinking and a different possible road to reality which might give us a complete understanding of nature and the world around us. And there are methods given by some Religion which guide us to experience new qualia, one can not measure qualia, one has to experience them. We all are in a kind of Mary's room and we don't have that knowledge of God and the exact nature of time, space and matter. Religion provides us a means through which we can come out of that room and guides us to have experiential knowledge. No true religious mystic will ever say that God(s) can be seen in the observable world.We call them the enlightened ones because they have access to the quale of God and that is the kind of knowledge they claim to have. Define God God(s) is/are a quale and it is universal. This means that everything which exists and real is a quale. God, time, space and matter are all qualia and the methods provided in my OP guide us to have experiential knowledge and through it one can know the exact nature of things as it "is", the kind of knowledge which science will never be to provide us.

This is due to Scientism and Positivists philosophical views sweeping through all domains of human knowledge and sociology is not an exemption from that. This means that there is no scope for abstract discussions on metaphysical concepts like God, if you want them to take your argument seriously then you need to provide evidence to support your argument otherwise your argument doesn't in any way add any new knowledge from what we know already. I have quoted only this part here and started a new thread in the philosophy section as you requested to have a political debate about our educational reforms and what should be taught and what we shouldn't to our younger generations, so that I don't hijack your thread.