do you believe in the SPIRIT REALM?

[Sisyphus]

Luckily medical science knows you're wrong, otherwise there wouldn't be such a thing as neuroscience.

[insane_alien]

isn't the phenomenon of phantom limbs where the receptors in the brain for that particular limb start picking up signals from other parts of the body? usually the closest area in the brain. i watched a documentary of a guy who felt feeling in a phantom limbe while shaving. the MRI scans showed that the are of the brain triggered by stimuli of the face covered an area usually covered by the right arm.

[bascule]

If you are relying on 'emergent properties' to explain how 2 equals 1, I'm afraid that was long ago exposed as lacking in the logic department.

 

Collections have properties which do not exist in the union of the properties of their component parts

[THoR]

Luckily medical science knows you're wrong, otherwise there wouldn't be such a thing as neuroscience.

I fail to see the connection. I don't contend that the body doesn't have a nervous system. It serves us well - in fact we couldn't 'DO' without it.

[THoR]

Collections have properties which do not exist in the union of the properties of their component parts

Example...

[Sisyphus]

I fail to see the connection. I don't contend that the body doesn't have a nervous system. It serves us well - in fact we couldn't 'DO' without it.

 

That's exactly what you're claiming. That our thoughts don't arise from physical mechanisms.

 

Example...

Sodium chloride. The computer you're reading this on. A paramecium. A fish. A human being.

[JohnB]

That's exactly what you're claiming. That our thoughts don't arise from physical mechanisms.

I don't think so. His argument is closer to "Our thoughts don't arise only from physical means". Quite a different argument.

[Sisyphus]

It amounts to the same thing. The laws of physics are violated in either case, since there must be action that has no physical cause but instead is actually but a side effect of some magical being from nowhere. Alternatively, he could think that all thoughts could be traced out as physical actions obeying physical laws, but they couldn't be considered experiences without some magical being to experience them. Presumably, a functioning body that lacked this magical being would be completely indistinguishable in all its actions from one that had it, being just an absolutely perfection automoton. I wonder if he thinks all humans have this being, or if some are automotons, or if he's the only actual person, or what. Or maybe he's just read Descartes and not given it any further thought.

[abskebabs]

But thought is an experience and something must "exist" in order to experience it.

I think this raises an interesting question. Can we exist without experiencing(at least mentally) or are the 2 fundamentally intertwined? I suppose we would have to be aware of our own thought to even be aware of our existence so to me, it doesn't seem one could exist without the other and so the 2 are inexorably intertwined anyway.

 

I would also be very grateful if any one reading this thread should also look up karl pribram and the holonomic(or holographic) brain theory and tell me what they make of it?

[padren]

Collections have properties which do not exist in the union of the properties of their component parts

Example...

 

A laser is just a laser and a shark is just a shark...but a shark with a mounted laser...OMGZ forget about it

 

 

But more seriously a collection of interlaced strings will have properties (like a fish net) that the strings on their own won't.

 

The question really is if the experience of consciousness is an emergent side effect of the mind' date=' or the side effect of an atomic unit called a "soul" or such. We already [i']know[/i] the brain is made out of parts, and with a drill and some anti-septic, we can do some pretty nasty parlor tricks with the thing.

 

No matter what you think about the brain, if you think it is the reason we are conscious, then you have to accept that it is a collection - if of nothing else, than at least of atoms.

 

If you believe the brain is just how the soul "communicates" with the body than you are already deep in the philosophical, and you can choose to believe the soul is or is not a singular unit without any need to rationalize it.

[JohnB]

It amounts to the same thing. The laws of physics are violated in either case, since there must be action that has no physical cause but instead is actually but a side effect of some magical being from nowhere.

No, the action simply has no currently detectable physical cause. Also it isn't a "side effect of some magical being from nowhere". (Unless you mean by magical they aren't currently understood.)

 

By (granted, a rather poor) analogy, if you couldn't detect radio waves, how would you explain a microwave oven? Food is put in cold and comes out hot, but there is no detectable heater.

 

The biggest problem with your theories is that they don't explain all data. (The experiences of people) The idea that all thought comes from a purely physical means is not falsifiable because it contains within itself the idea that all contrary data is automatically false. Any example of contrary data is immediately classified as deliberate falsehood, imagination or delusion of some sort.

 

A challenge for you.

 

A young man was working with his father on a project making a seashell house as a present for his mother a number of years ago, before the project was finished, the father was killed in a traffic accident. A few years after the father's death, the young man became very ill himself and finished up in the ICU. His father appeared to him while he was ill (around 2 AM) and made motions that everything would be alright. The young man recovered, not miraculously, but he got better over the next week or so.

 

The "purely physical" idea explains everything in this incident. (Like very ill people don't hallucinate. ) What it doesn't explain is the fact that the morning after the "visit" the floor at the foot of the young man's bed had a scattering of sand and seashells on it.

 

Can you explain this without calling someone a liar or a cheat?

 

BTW, I know the events occurred as described. The young man is my nephew.

[bascule]

Example...

 

The internal combustion engine. Take away, say, the alternator or distributor, and it ceases to have the properties of an internal combustion engine (i.e. it can no longer convert gasoline fuel into mechanical energy). Neither will the alternator or distributor have these properties in an of themselves. Only when you reassemble the engine into working order does it have these properties. None of the individual parts of the engine have these properties in and of themselves.

 

This goes for virtually any machine: it's built out of parts which are arranged in such a way to accomplish a given task which none of the parts alone can accomplish.

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

The internal combustion engine. Take away' date=' say, the alternator or distributor, and it ceases to have the properties of an internal combustion engine (i.e. it can no longer convert gasoline fuel into mechanical energy). Neither will the alternator or distributor have these properties in an of themselves. Only when you reassemble the engine into working order does it have these properties. None of the individual parts of the engine have these properties in and of themselves.

 

This goes for virtually any machine: it's built out of parts which are arranged in such a way to accomplish a given task which none of the parts alone can accomplish.[/quote']

A reducibly complex mousetrap.

[SmallIsPower]

I believe in the Spirit Realm, very much so, and I did my share of LSD, but I saw "The Late, Great Tim Leary" round 1975, and was he ever fried! Nothing he said made any sense. About this time, my yoga teacher said that focusing on psychic matters can create a condition "more incurable than cancer". Pschic powers can lead to pschosis, or in some cases, like Hitler's, the worst kind of evil. Don't be attached to the sixth chacra, go to the seventh, the awareness of oneness. Contacting the spirit is then easy, natural and safe, as it's a function of our interconectedness.

[gib65]

Wow! If I every visit the spirit realm, I'll remember the seventh chacra. I wouldn't want to become Hitler. Thanks, SIP.