posted
Shlomo is right, and thank you for pointing out assumptions I had not picked up. I never expected or meant my idea to be an alternate explanation to scientific knowledge and theories. I won't fear the retribution of John and I will play the religion card: My idea assumes the religious belief that there is a spirit.
If there is a spirit, then it must follow that there is a way that the spirit fuses with the body.
I would politely ask that if you want to argue the existance of the spirit, you consider that a different discussion than a theory on how things work if there actually is a spirit.
On the topic of ignorance, even wanton ignorance:
There is great joy in learning. And I believe one of the best ways to learn is by discussing. It is interactive and requires examination of knowledge and logic. But such a process breaks down when anger, defensiveness, and lack of patience rules the semantics one uses in the discussion. I will be the first to stand up and say that I've been guilty of this.
There is also great joy in teaching. It is fantastic to be teaching someone a concept and see them catch an understanding of it. But the student will shut you out if they find you to be putting them down if they are wrong.
This is not a class, but a meeting of minds where some people have more knowledge in some areas than others. What a beautiful thing to share! You lose nothing, and someone gains something. I would even say that in the explanation of the concept, you gain a slightly better understanding. The total sum of knowledge has just increased. But again, this process is curtailed by contention.
If you are right, then it is an act of kindness to correct people. But people may not always believe you. This is no reason to get angry at them. This does not make you better or worse than they. But we must also realize that we may be wrong, and there is nothing bad about this. Being wrong, we correct ourselves, and correcting ourselves we grow. We become superior to what we were before. And that is always a (damn you, Martha Stewart, you've ruined those words!) a good thing.
The computer - brain analogy:
It is useful sometimes to use a computer as an analogy to the brain. But as we've seen, it breaks down whenever you try to make it more than an analogy.
I think John has made the most pertinant point: Computers cannot create. I am not talking about big artistic creation. I'm talking about the simple stuff we do everyday. Humans can recognize anyone's handwriting without much difficulty. Even truly awful handwriting is mostly recognizable. This is because we can imagine lines where there are none and delete lines that are superfluous. All of this, we do usually without thinking. This extrapolation is so easy for us simply because we can imagine what is not there. And that is an aspect of creation that computers don't have. Sure, we are programming computers to do that in a limited fashion, but the computer can't use that information to do anything else. Where we can use the same exact skill to predict that a half drawn object is going to turn out to be a bird. Not only a bird, but an eagle.
Pod said:
quote:The biopsychologists i've talked to are extremely disdaneful of both cognitive psychologists and computational neurodynamics.
Argh. That kind of attitude is far more harmful to science than ignorance of the masses.
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posted
Well, I can't rightly argue with you on the existance of a spirit, because I have no definite opinion either way. So, if you're basing your entire idea from the assumption of a spirit, it is, as I said, unarguable.
But that's fine. As long as you're being open with it, like Amka is, then there's nothing more I can say except that it's conjecture and unprovable, thus of little use to science or medicine (unless you are using faith healing).
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Speculation is fine, but the problem I have with it is that it uses unprovable and unmeasurable assumptions. I have no "retribution" for Amka ( ) because she basically diffused what I was saying by being straight-forward and saying outright that it assumes religious belief. I can't argue that, mostly because I'm not in the business of trying to disprove people's faith (they are entitled to is as much as I am entitled to not have it).
[edit] It would be nicer if all of the massive evidence in neurophysiology and neuropsychology were actually compiled and put together into salient cooperative reports, but that's gonna take time, and I'm not involved in any such research, so I can't even say what is being done to accomplish it. However, a lot of this information can be found in numerous biology texts, and for particulars there were at least two books mentioned in the quotes I gave. The info is there, none of it is complete, though.
[ April 19, 2004, 12:18 AM: Message edited by: John L ]
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quote:This gives a total of (very roughly) 100 terabytes for the brain.
This is completely fallacious. One could similarly claim: disk platter substrates are made of aluminum alloys; each molecule in a metal crystal can assume 100 states (in reality it's a lot more...); therefore any disk that weighs 100g can store 100 ^ (100 * 6 * 10^23) bits. Not.
Without a working model of memory, our only recourse at the moment is to approach the problem from neuropsychology -- what limits on information storage have we observed in the real world? Numerical and text data is no contest, obviously; images and scenes I've covered; algorithms were treated in detail with no objection. What else is there? Put up or shut up, as they say.
Pod has the right idea. We have no idea what the mapping function between memories and neurons looks like. Any claim to perform calculations on these unknowns is at best a shot in the dark, and at worst a defensive agenda reminiscent of 19th century chemists who thought organic molecules were too complex to be synthesized. Unfortunately for them, we've already achieved the computational equivalent of urea, and whether it takes "a few centuries" or a few years is irrelevant.
I too think it will be on the 100+ year timescale, but that doesn't invalidate some core truths. Digital computers, for all their weaknesses, are still Turing-complete. Organic brains, for all their strengths, still cannot break the laws of information theory.
quote:This is what I hate about computer geeks
Hint: repeated arguments ad hominem don't make you look good
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quote:But that's fine. As long as you're being open with it, like Amka is, then there's nothing more I can say except that it's conjecture and unprovable, thus of little use to science or medicine (unless you are using faith healing).
Hold on, now. Just because Amka is taking this on religious faith does not mean she can't be proven wrong or right. After all, there have been plenty of things taken on religious faith that have been proven one way or the other - like the old idea that the earth was the center of the solar system.
For one thing, if Amka is suggeting that the soul has some sort of effect on how the body acts and makes the body do things that the same body would not have done had there been no soul, then scientific study should be able to see this at some point. If no such effects exist, then how can we believe the soul is fused with the body in the way Amka is suggesting?
Furthermore, I would argue that philosophical analysis, along with the simple observation that we experience life, has ALREADY proven that the soul must exist (for the reasons I gave briefly earlier.) This would depend on how you define "soul" though. (I define it as our conscious self - that which experiences things.)
And that raises the question... Amka, when you say you have faith in the existence of a soul, what do you mean? What do you consider a soul to be?
And why does its existence imply it must be fused with a body in the manner you suggested?
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RB: If it is so obvious that computers are more powerful than the brain, why don't we have a computer brain yet? John: If humans are so smart, why don't we have a computer brain yet?
I think deja vu is the result of assigning the perception of a situation to an analogous memory that is not where it was expected to be. Most of my deja vu that I would class as such is when a situation in reality correlates with a situation from a dream.
When I'm going about my daily routine, I expect to be accessing reference situations from a daily routine part of my brain, which I assume exists. I don't guess there is a lot of money in mapping it. It would be pretty hard to get someone to truly do their daily routine whilst wired up to an MRI brain mapping thing. Stupid Heisenberg principle.
If a situation arises that better fits my dream part of my brain, then I get this weird "am I dreaming or awake?" feeling. I don't always dream about movie stars. I dream about parking structures a lot as well. And the other night I dreamed I was posting on hatrack, making my point through acrostic sentences (the first letter of each word spells out a secret message. In this case it was the f-bomb. It seemed so real!)
Well, I had some stuff I wanted to say about Jane, but I'll put it over on the other side.
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Oops. Sorry mackillian. You were still in the middle of teaching your class, and I interrupted. Go ahead.
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I've been saying spirit because I believe the soul is the spirit fused with the body, or perhaps the spirit after that experience.
In LDS theology, we existed as spirits before we were born. There is not a lot we know about it except that at that time we had intelligence and free will. We know this because in our theology there was a debate in heaven and we all had to choose.
We also know that we have always existed in some form. Before we were spirits we were intelligences. Heavenly Father gave us 'spirit bodies' to house our intelligence. There is not a lot more known beyond that, but I've always assumed it to mean we were given the ability to have input and output, thereby giving us the ability to learn, thereby giving us free will. For all of our scientific discussion, it is this intelligence or will, I believe, that endows us with creativity.
There are other examples of what our spirit should be like. In our theology, the angel Gabriel was the spirit of Noah. I'm not sure what it was Noah who gave the message to Mary, but that was his assignment. The archangel Michael is actually Adam. These spirits have form, and we do not believe this form was put on to appease the witness receiving the message. God and heaven, after all, have integrity. Why show something that is not real?
Also, in our theology, everything has a spirit and an intelligence. The auia speculation in the Speaker books is a very common LDS idea (though not doctrine). Most anyone who was LDS and didn't know OSC was LDS would have started to wonder if he might be or have been LDS after reading that.
So with form, spirit needs a way to interface with body. The more complex the intelligence, the more complex the interface needs to be. This may very well have been an aspect of the selection process for evolution: the will of spirit to have a more fitting vessel, with an infinite variety of such intelligences.
I am frustrated with the crude manner that some have assumed such an interaction to have. I used the keyboard-computer as an analogy. To think that the spirit would rule the body with some sort of telekinesis is crude. The fusion is far subtler than that and involves questions of why sub atomic particles always ALWAYS act in such a manner that we can actually describe laws of physics. Our laws of physics do not exist because we have some special insight into the universe. They exist because that is what we have observed, over and over again, without exception. But WHY? So far, any why questions have only been answered by more laws, at more basic levels but never have we known why particles act in such ways.
More speculation on my part: We know that ultimately, all matter is actually energy. But what if the tiniest spark of energy is actually will, intelligence? An equation, so to speak, expressed existentially. The more complex the will, the more complex must be the expression of that will in existence, binding other wills to help it accomplish its own expression. In every instance though, these combinations will follow the laws of physics because we have observed and noted the laws of physics within this existence I'm describing. I'm calling it will, but below a certain threshold, I do not believe these simple particle wills have free will or choice. They merely express a simple equation. Equation, here, is an analogy. I'm not sure exactly what the will is.
As we are talking about energy, I'm thinking of wave theory. Where do the waves come from? Something starts them, and they are carried by passive media.
To borrow a scriptural axiom, "man is to act, not to be acted upon". (Sorry mack, but if you're gone you're gone- though I think the brainpower vs. computer power discussion is at least as irrelevant as Mormon space doctrine. If you come back, though, I wanted to ask where the white matter is since I'd always thought of the brain as gray matter.)
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posted
My concept of the veil is definitely being developed in this discussion. My current thinking is that the veil is simply the construct of what we have learned in this life. Not worldliness or materialism even, just learning to control our bodies and value things of proximity over things of importance.
I think this applies both to the baby learning not to bite her mother and to the final judgement when we ask the Lord "when saw we Thee naked, and hungered and athirst?" Both the "good" and the "bad" will ask this question, but those who served their neighbors will continue on while those who served themselves will not. It certainly challenges the idea that altruism is ultimately self serving.
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posted
Oh, and one more, although not unique to LDS doctrine...the notion of demonic possession.
Christ had an encounter with a man possessed by a legion of devils. The devils were somehow able to induce the man to speak. Did the devils override the owner-spirit's interface to the brain?
Ya know what, bringing religion into this kinda dumbs down the whole discussion. Maybe we should go back to the computer/brain analogy.
posted
The brain is the seat of the mind. It is the source of consciousness. Think of our soul, or personality, as a holographic projection from the hardware that is our brain. In a side note, that is why "The Matrix" movie's idea of being unplugged would kill you was always a bit sour for me. Of course it would not kill you! Like I said, your mind is a projection from your brain...sure, in the Matrix you can cast out the projection much farther out, but if you are unplugged you should not be "lost" or killed. Think of your brain as a flashlight. The light is your mind and personality. Your body is the wall which reflects the light. In the Matrix, the wall is just much farther out... so if you get unplugged the light is still shining on from the flashlight, it will just reflect again from the wall that is your body. That is why head and brain damage is so terrible and horrifying for me… it is like raping the soul.
[ April 19, 2004, 12:57 PM: Message edited by: Telperion the Silver ]
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posted
Tel, have you read the Dune series? You remind me of when they have the ecumenical convention (in the backstory) and the only thing they can agree on is "thou shalt not disfigure the soul" (soul being used as human spirit here, I think ). <-- because of where the series eventually went, in abnegating transcendence.
Skillery, I don' t think the dumbing down is inevitable, just when the questions come so thick. Also, I think something that would be incomprehensible to a non Mormon might better go on Nauvoo.com. Though I don't like it over there. I like my liberals to be liberals and not confused conservatives.
P.S. I'm not prepared to touch demonic possession with a 10 foot pole. It's out there with ghost sightings for me. Are there perfectly sincere people who've seen it? Sure. But I don't feel a need to be one of them.
What I want is scientific data combined with speculation and religious ideas that do not refute or replace that data. All truth is truth, regardless. God does not make things appear to be what they aren't, therefore what we observe using the scientific method must be true. But that does not mean that religious belief or speculation is must be false, or that it is somehow stupider or a more dumbed down version of the truth. There is still a LOT to learn assuming religious beliefs that do not fly in the face of science. I believe we gain a deeper understanding by utilizing all the tools we have to learn truth.
Not only that, there was another discussion going on about computer technology vs. brain. There is no reason for that discussion to stop. I found it quite fascenating.
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posted
Here's a couple of ideas on the "veil" thing:
We don't remember what took place before our spirits entered our bodies because God supposedly put in place a "veil of forgetfulness." This suggests that without the veil, there is the possibility that we might have remembered something. This in turn suggests that spirits do have memory capacity.
I read somewhere that conceptual information, as opposed to visual information, is stored in the human brain in the form of the spoken language of the individual. This might explain why we don't remember much of what look place when we were infants. We had no language as infants to translate our experiences into prior to storage in memory.
Perhaps the conceptual information that is part of our spirit memory is not stored in a language that we are currently capable of understanding, at least not very well.
Visual memories from pre-mortality would have been recorded before we had physical eyeballs for processing visible light. Perhaps we don't remember anything viewed in our prior life as spirits because we have no visual context in this life by which to interpret visual spirit memories.
Perhaps we don't remember much of what we saw with our infant eyes because we had no experience translating visible light images into recognizable symbols.
So a "veil of forgetfulness" might simply be a loss of the language key and symbol key (maybe those two are the same thing).
posted
I don't know how appropriate this is to this thread any more, but I just can't leave questions unanswered
I was just using vaccinations to show how the same outcome is explained by the two different schools of thought. You know that when you're vaccinated your body responds to the viral fragments and mounts an immune response. The end result being you're able to react to that same foreign body faster should you encounter again in your life. Classical thinking would say that your body is responding the fragments themselves, just by being there they promote a response. The Danger Model says that the body doesn't work that way and these little pieces of proteins would float unnoticed in the body so long as nothing "dies badly". But, because the needle damages your cells on delivery of the vaccine your immune system gets activated at the site of the damage. Like many things the truth will probably turn out to be a combination of the two.
Does that make it any clearer?
Well, it's always going to be a case of "we have only discovered these things so far." With the tongue we’ve figured out that there are these things that bind to specific receptors on the taste buds and cause them to release a neurotransmitter to a nearby nerve to fire off a signal to the brain (sweet, sour, salty, bitter). But each taste bud can detect each taste, although the specificity isn't always the same. Heck, we’re even pretty sure why we respond to them. But there are so many things that can be on the surface of cells, it'd be pretty hard to say that we’ve found all of them. For instance, we recently realized that the tongue also responds to certain amino acids and fire off "this is good" signals to the brain. This is where MSG fits in. I realize I'm just kind of talking around your point without really answering your question, but that's because I don't really understand what your question is.
Just because I'm already rambling, there are different receptors in the skin that detect different things. It's not that something is hot or cold, but there are different receptors for temperatures above and below body temperatures. Same with sharp or dull, sharp signals are sent along "fast" nerves and dull ones are sent along "slow" nerves (myelinated or unmylinated). Generally we say that the skin responds to touch-pressure, temperature, nocicpetion/pain and proprioception. Is it possible that there are other things that the skin responds to that we don't know about? Sure, there’s billions of different things your skin can come into contact with, some of which may not illicit a conscious response. These are just the ones we're sure of. Given the amount of study that's been done on both these organs, is it probable that we've completely overlooked something? No, but scientists generally hate to rule things out completely (because if they do they'll probably be quoted 50 years down the road when we find out otherwise and undergraduate students around the world will laugh at them for the rest of time).
Again, back to your regularly scheduled conversation.
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[edit, simultaneous postage] Bob, thanks. I guess the sensors in the tongue and skin are also neurally networked and so while there are a limited number of primary values, they can be combined in various ways to produce different results. I guess the classic example is that a combo of warm and very intense is reported back to the brain as "very hot" when the intensity came from a cold stimulus. Love the Exploratorium. So I guess I was making the mistake of assuming the inputs are digital. [/edit]
Skillery:
quote:I read somewhere that conceptual information, as opposed to visual information, is stored in the human brain in the form of the spoken language of the individual.
Now this is a topic you don't have to be Mormon to debate. Is there thought without language? Is there a thought that can remain without our brain naming it, even if it is a new word?
As I have alluded to several times, Linguists (at least in the 90's) believed that true languages processing is not possible without "Strong A.I.". "Weak A.I." would be most of what we now know as Artificial Intelligence. It can produce the results we want, we don't really care how the computer does it (as consumers, the programmers care a great deal). "Strong A.I." would be self-aware, genuine consciousness. (Though I think the meaning of consciousness fell through the cracks earlier on this thread).
The analogy of human intelligence I often hear is that a dog can know that he's laying on the floor in front of the fireplace. But he doesn't know that he knows that he's laying on the floor.... I guess it could be called the capacity for meta-thought. Thought about thought. Meh, I'll start my own thread.
We don't know how the brain works. It's -pointless- to speculate how much it can store. We don't know, we don't have any way of knowing.
The brain is an extremely complicated device, it doesn't just store data, thus, we can't even say how much neuronal matter is dedicated to storage, and in what fashion.
Pooka, we have devices that can store alot of data. Again the brain is not just a squishy storage device, it's an extremely complicated fully integrated recever, processing device and storage device all in one.
The issue is not one of raw materials, its one of mappings and coding.
But, i will say that 100 terabytes seems extremly high. My argument is that i bet information stored in the brain is extremely compressed (and lossy). Theres no way to test this, however, it seems odd to say for instance, that the brain would be recording say 44 kHz audio, and then storing it to disk (we don't need all that raw info). Now, think how much 44 kHz audio you could record to a 100 terabyte disk. That means that -all- the information is retrevable later. Since people don't seem to be terribly good at that, i'd say that it seems unlikely that we're storing anything in extremely high fidelity.
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Pooka, that's not it. Recursion and meta-thought is something that AI researchers are very interested in (check out Douglas Hofstader), but the issue of strong AI vs weak AI is more one of Qualitative experience.
It amounts to this: A demon who's omniscient in the sense that he knows the positions and interactions of all the particles in the entire universe, will obviously know exactly what's going on inside a particular person at any given time.
However, can such a demon be said to know what it is like to be that person, simply by knowing all this information?
Since i'm a qualia reductionist, i'd say yeah. it's not an issue. Tresopax would disagree.
Anyway, language is not a strong vs weak AI thing. Language is based on two things, convention, and the way the world is. Thus it has nothing to do with theories of consciousness.
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Certainly, one can use religious beliefs to point one in the direction of truth (Newton, Galileo), but it seems to always rely on science to get at the truth.
When has religion, by itself, ever shown the truth? "God exists?" You may believe it to be true, but religion does not show it to be true. Religion states it as true--claims it as its primary tenet.
What does religion prove?
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I disagree, Pod (about storage). But what's interesting is I can take in a tune but can't sing it right away. But the more I hear it, the better I can sing it. The more I sing it, the better I can sing it. Both of these are the exact opposite of magnetic media (in my experience, at least.)
How is saying the brain is too complex to ever be understood different from saying anything we don't understand is explained by religion?
P.S. I also heartily disagree about language not being an AI thing. But I guess all this demostrates is why people in disciplines that sound related but are different can disagree.
We are nothing but the wall that separates us from Everything Else, aka the Universe, aka God, aka the collective sea of souls which is in fact one great "Oversoul". We are all waves... separate and unique, but all still part of the Ocean and part of each other.
[ April 19, 2004, 02:11 PM: Message edited by: Telperion the Silver ]
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I was wondering when someone would bring up Hofstader. I think he's right in that if all intelligence is algorithmic (which is the underlying assumption that a Turing machine can become intelligent), then it will be the self-referential/meta-recursive capabilities that make it so. I'm just no convinced he's made the case strongly enough that this is enough to achieve strong AI.
posted
i didn't say that it was too complicated to be explained, i just said that the hard part of building a brain was not the physical stuff, it was how to connect together the physical stuff in a meaningful way.
And second, so what? if you practice, you'll get better. That's got nothing to do with recursion or meta anything. That's a simple loop.
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I don't think turing machines are a basis for intellegence. They're deterministic. And i don't think living things are. And besides, they still have to deal with Godel incompleteness.
Thats really the issue with recursion. Any sufficently interesting set of axioms aren't complete, and are provably incomplete. We need a different class of device. But its interesting to see how much of any sort of behavior can be accounted for with symbolic or connectionist systems.
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Going back to the initial point (Mind as interface).
How many here have experienced, either directly of immediately indirectly (being with a loved one, for instance), when part of the mind goes missing?
Some more than others, obviously. Some, not at all.
Ami, I stood by my mother as her body (and brain) were ravaged both by leukemia, and by the drugs that were supposed to help her (but didn't). I watched her lose her mind--physically and chemically (and, if you want--spiritually). I saw absolutely nothing to indicate that there was a soul trapped within, trying to get out.
C.S. Lewis makes the same mistake you do on this: in "The Problem of Pain," he discounts the pain of the mentally retarded--either they don't know that they have a problem (they all appear to be totally happy to him, anyhow!), or they'll get over it, and have no memory of their temporary bout with retardation. I would like to award him the posthumous "Clueless" prize, if I may.
We really don't have to wory about the mentally reatarded, then; do we? According to Lewis, they're just fine as they are.
posted
Steve, i know that was english, and well formed english, but i didn't get anything out of that. I apologize, but could you explain what you just said in some other way?
-pod
i'll also be out for an hour, as my class is about to begin
[ April 19, 2004, 02:18 PM: Message edited by: Pod ]
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Pod- for someone who thinks we can never understand the brain, you sure seem certain everyone else is wrong. But we do agree on one thing:
quote:We need a different class of device.
ssywak, I don't know what C.S. Lewis meant by mentally retarded. I would agree that people with Down Syndrome should be taken at face value when they seem happy, though. But I haven't been able to get into that book.
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quote:Anyway, language is not a strong vs weak AI thing. Language is based on two things, convention, and the way the world is. Thus it has nothing to do with theories of consciousness.
This isn't entirely true, at least if comprehension is included as part of language. A "weak AI" computer can take in certain language inputs and express the correct language as output. That's the Turing test. But for those (like me) who would argue that you don't really comprehend what is being said unless you also can convert the language into qualitative experiences, only a "strong AI" computer can truly comprehend language.
This is the basis behind the Chinese Room argument, among others. Right chinese input, right chinese output, no understanding of chinese.
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Religion cannot be used to prove anything, let alone the existence of God or a soul.
To be complete: neither can science be used to prove the existence of God (not that we're trying, mind you), or the soul.
If one wants to believe in God & Soul, then fine--go ahead by all means. But any statements that "God is this", or "the Soul does that" are theoretical at best, and misleading at worst.
At least when a physicist states that "the lepton effects a change in the muon through weak interaction" (or whatever), all the terms are defined, and agreed upon, and the results can be reproduced. Eventually, the knowledge gained can be used to understand and manipulate the world.
Religion is no better at understanding the world than science (though I could possible be proven wrong on that, I would love to see it refuted--really, I would!). But, as DOG has said elsewhere--it is pretty good at manipulating it!
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I have never said that religion proves anything. Religion is about faith, and has more to do with behavior than anything else. A few truths I learned through religion that have been proven to me not only by experience, but by religious experience:
Balance in everything. Do unto others as you would have them do to you. Personal integrity. God loves everyone as intimately as he loves me.
So, I can stand here and say I believe in God and that he loves everyone. That is a religious belief, and my own experience has proven it. I believe it to be true, but I understand that you don't. You can't use my own experience to prove the concept.
But I can also stand here and say that I believe the universe is billions of years old and it has taken millions of years for life to evolve to the form it is today on earth. I got this through study of observed and collected data that other scientists gathered.
These two bits of personal knowledge are not exclusive of eachother and were gotten through different means.
As for the soul trapped in a body: the experience of the spirit is so wholly tied up in the body that it cannot feel as if its will is being acted upon in a contrary manner. The person simply becomes confused. How can you tell why they are confused when they are incoherent? And I am not at all saying that they do not experience pain. They do, in fact, experience great pain.
You yourself know, I'm sure, that saying that you saw no evidence of a trapped soul struggling to get out doesn't mean that is not true. It simply means you were unable to observe it.
All I am saying is that, for the religious, we must seek for the truth using every tool possible and that truth is more than just physical descriptions of the universe.
posted
Is there any recorded instance of a trapped soul successfully escaping the body? I mean a case in which the subject said: "I'm leaving now," and then the body died for no medical reason.
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We don't have that power. That is an act of God. Besides, even if one managed to do that, it would still be suicide.
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From a religious viewpoint it would be called suicide, but what would the medical cause of death be?
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quote:1) Balance in everything. 2) Do unto others as you would have them do to you. 3) Personal integrity. 4) God loves everyone as intimately as he loves me.
I agree with you on items 1-3. Please note, however, that religion--and its attendant requirement for a belief in a large and powerful spiritual entity--is entirely unecessary for these items.
But where did you get the idea that God loves everyone (as intimately as he loves you)?
Your religion told you that, and then told you to interpret what you experience as proving that. I would bet that you were also taught to interpret totally contradicting information as proving that.
You've been taught (I'll assume) that when things go really well it's proof of God's love.
You've been taught (I'll assume) that when things go really badly it's proof of God's love.
When people are born, when they die, while they live--it's all proof of God's love.
When bones heal--God's love. When children die--God's love. Brain damage; leukemia; altzheimers; dementia; murderous rage; thunderstorms; house fires; pederasty; massacres--all proof of God's love.
"Timmy fell down the well--pray for his safe return"
Ten-year-old Timmy dies in the well, screaming in pain and fear, his shoulder dislocated and his thorasic spine broken in two places, surrounded in his own vomit, urine and feces.
"It must be God's will...God is love"
At what point would experience convince you that (4) is false?
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quote:Ten-year-old Timmy dies in the well, screaming in pain and fear, his shoulder dislocated and his thorasic spine broken in two places, surrounded in his own vomit, urine and feces.
God's love comes into play when a stranger rides up to the well to water his horse, and a voice (or the smell) says: "stop!"
God must love the stranger more than Timmy, and I'm okay with that. He was an obnoxious little cuss anyway.
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Misery is not a sign of God's love. It's a sign of living in the real world. Adam and Eve made the choice to live in the real world, and misery is the consequence. It's not such a bad deal; we learn by being miserable. In Candyland we learn nothing.
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You and I share such a basically different perspective that it is nearly impossible to communicate how I can believe this. So that you can understand. Believing that death is the end, all suffering in this short life is unacceptable to you and God should not have inflicted it upon us.
I believe we existed before we were born and there never was a point where we didn't exist. I believe we will continue to exist after we die and will never cease to exist.
So for me, how miniscule is this life, in that great, infinite span? In that perspective, the young boy suffered but an instant. The pain will be behind us, but what we DID with that pain will always be with us. Did we wallow in it, allow ourselves to be overcome? Or did we push ourselves as much as possible and overcome it?
The horrible things that happen are not the direct result of God's love but the result of us living in a mortal and imperfect sphere where we must meet up with challenges, sometimes extreme. It is the result of our own choice to live in this sphere in order to gain experience. I believe we had an idea, abstract as it was, of what we were in for.
For me, the boy died, painfully and alone, but he is with God now and the pain is gone. For you, the boy simply ceased to exist, painfully and alone.
In my perspective, death is not the horrible thing to be avoided. Death is the next step, entered into sometimes painfully and sometimes peacefully.
There will never be anything so horrible that it proves to me that God doesn't exist and doesn't love. It is not merely religion that has taught me this. I have my own experience. I am not blind to the suffereing, nor have I not experienced it. I simply carry a different perspective.
Perhaps an analogy will help: When strength training, pain is an expected part of the process. If I stop the program because of the pain, my muscles will weaken and I will become less healthy. Which is better for me? To avoid the pain, or overcome my fear of it?
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I'll paraphrase something said by Jack Nicholson's character in "As Good As It Gets" "You're not pissed that you had it so bad, you pissed that so many other people had it so good". This probably described me at my low point in recovering from the death of my son. I could maybe get why my child had died, but not why I should be happy that anyone else experienced miracles. But you don't think I'm going to parade the answer for a cynic such as yourself? You won't listen to me anyway. Posts: 11017 | Registered: Apr 2003
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quote:If one wants to believe in God & Soul, then fine--go ahead by all means. But any statements that "God is this", or "the Soul does that" are theoretical at best, and misleading at worst.
Again, I disagree. The soul may be within the sphere of things we can investigate.
As I told John earlier:
quote:For one thing, if Amka is suggeting that the soul has some sort of effect on how the body acts and makes the body do things that the same body would not have done had there been no soul, then scientific study should be able to see this at some point. If no such effects exist, then how can we believe the soul is fused with the body in the way Amka is suggesting?
Furthermore, I would argue that philosophical analysis, along with the simple observation that we experience life, has ALREADY proven that the soul must exist (for the reasons I gave briefly earlier.) This would depend on how you define "soul" though. (I define it as our conscious self - that which experiences things.)
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Okay P.S. Besides, it wasn't in a well. Don't most deaths involve feces anyway? But I still don't know if I can put the answer in words for you. So much for no thought without language.
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So many people can't believe in a God that allows suffering. Not a loving God, anyway.
Steve, I have been reading OSC's book "The Worthing Chronicle". I don't know if you have read it, but it deals with this very tender subject. Thousands of worlds are protected by near-omniscient super-humans from experiencing any pain. Their lives go on peacefully with no real fear or regret.
Then, suddenly, that protection ceases. People die and suffer, all the more since they have never learned how to protect themselves. These super-humans have made a conscious decision to allow this to happen. They are still aware of all the pain suffered, all the horrible consequences. They have the power to stop it. And they choose not to. Why would they make that decision? OSC investigates this idea in the book as well as many other things. I recommend it.
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) because she basically diffused what I was saying by being straight-forward and saying outright that it assumes religious belief. I can't argue that, mostly because I'm not in the business of trying to disprove people's faith (they are entitled to is as much as I am entitled to not have it).![[Smile]](smile.gif)
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<-- because of where the series eventually went, in abnegating transcendence.![[Razz]](tongue.gif)
