Are Gods physical?

[ytrewq]

In a previous thread I was astounded to hear the claim that Gods are not physical, presumably meaning they do not consist of physical matter. How any theist could actually claim to know that is a mystery, but never mind. The question being asked here is :-

Are Gods made from physical matter, and if they are not, then what are they made from.

If they are able to think and do stuff, then presumably they must be made of something.

By physical matter, I mean the physical stuff within our Universe from which everything else is made from, which includes atoms, sub-atomic particles, and to be fair I suppose we must include dark matter as well.

But there are other classes of things that undeniably exist, that are not physical matter as such, that perhaps Gods could be made of. Here is a list of stuff that definitely exists, and thus Gods might potentially be made of :-

(a) Physical matter, including atoms, sub-atomic particles, and dark matter

(b) Electromagnetic radiation and other forms of radiation, energy and fields. For example, light and radio waves.

(c) Human (or animal) feelings, emotions, thoughts, love, hate jealousy, intelligence, stupidity, truth, dishonesty, spirituality and so on. All of these can be said to exist, but not in a physical form.

(d) Similar to (c), morals, legal or scientific laws, stories, information, principles, and so on. As with (c), all of these can be said to exist, but not in a physical form, although the media that encodes them may be physical, such as a book or CD.

OK. So what are Gods made from? Certainly not anything in the (c) or (d) category, which do not physically exist in their own right and are not capable of performing physical feats on their own. That is, it makes no sense to say that a God (or anything else) is made from love, or justice or logic or spirituality. These are attributes of something that physically exists.

I have heard it said that Gods are not physical, but spiritual. Spiritual is an adjective, an attribute of something that exists, so it makes no sense to say that a God is made of spirituality, any more than saying it is made of love. So sure, Gods probably are very spiritual things, but that says nothing of what they are made from, which is the topic of this thread.

So what is left? Within the realms of human knowledge, and Im not interested in just making stuff up, then I must conclude that Gods (if they exist) are made of the same stuff that everything else in the Universe is made of, being categories (a) and (b).

Anyone agree or disagree with the above?

[rikuoamero]

[Replying to post 239 by Mithrae]

Similarly, there is a slim chance that the rare phenomenon of anaesthesia awareness was in play and that she correctly guessed the nature of the surgical tools without consciously considering or previously seeing them and that the moulded speakers in her ears emitting frequent loud clicks to check her brain's responses did not prevent her hearing the staff's conversation. None of those is particularly probable alone, let alone all together, but they are possible. Of course out-of-body experiences are pretty rare/improbable too. So since it's a somewhat arbitrary guess anyway I would suppose something along the lines of a 1/3 probability of the anaesthesia awareness explanation being correct, 1/3 probability that she had a genuine OBE under anaesthesia (of which many other reports exist), and 1/3 probability that in addition to a genuine OBE Pam also perceived the timing correctly and had conscious experience without brain activity (which is what makes this a particularly rare and interesting case).

I'm going to ask you what I plan to ask razorsedge.

First, just briefly to get it out of the way, since I haven't read all the posts on this thread, can you link me to this story about this Pam person? Thanks in advance.

Now, just so I understand things correctly, apparently a woman, Pam, becomes unconscious thanks to anaesthesia and is able to report "the nature of the surgical tools without consciously considering or previously seeing them and that the moulded speakers in her ears emitting frequent loud clicks to check her brain's responses did not prevent her hearing the staff's conversation."
As of right now, as I type this, I obviously have not read up on this woman, so I do not have her transcript (supposing she gave one) of the conversation, or what she mentioned regarding the tools.
However, I'd like to bring your attention to the 'moulded speaker' in her ears. You mentioned that they did not prevent her from hearing the conversation, presumably like one would expect normal earbuds to do when playing music.
This to me sounds like (pun not intended) that you are using the paradigm of sound being a series of vibrations in the air, which are picked up by the ear-drum, which then sends electrical signals to the brain, which then interprets them.
So answer me this - how did she hear the conversation then? If, as she says, her consciousness was outside her body, this would presumably then mean she did not have access to her sensory organs, primarily her eyes and ears.
What did she report her 'vision' to be like, in this out of body mode? Was it seeing forward, with some peripheral vision, like she normally would have while in body? But how can that be? Out-of-body mode has no eyes. There's nothing picking up the light being reflected from objects. There's nothing reacting to the vibrations in the air. There's no nerves sending electrical impulses and no brain to interpret them.

What I would expect an out of body experience to be like, (presuming they're real) would be a literal blank and silent void.

If Pam did report the conversation accurately, then this means she heard it. Unless you'd like to posit that the conversation was detected via some other method by Pam, using some as yet unknown sensory receptors, I don't see how her claims can be considered credible. If Pam reports seeing the surgical tools...then she saw them. With what? Magical invisible eyes? What processed the image of the tools? Why would people who report OBEs describe them in terms of how they would otherwise normally experience the world, if the OBE is supposed to be while one does not have access to the very organs that enable said normal experience? If someone says they were a bodiless spirit, shouldn't they be in a dark void? Or shouldn't they be able to see all 360 degrees around them at once? What about spectrum? How come these OBEs aren't described as showing more of the light spectrum than their physical eyes can see?

[ytrewq]

[Replying to post 239 by Mithrae]

..there is absolutely zero evidence against Pam's account of the timing of her experiences,

A classic error in reasoning - please Google Russel's Teapot. And also Google Occam's Razor while you are about it. Just because we cannot disprove an assertion, does not give any reason to believe that it is true.

You are of course welcome to form your own conclusions re Pam. I take the conventional view that it's madness to seriously consider a paranormal explanation, that does not fit within very-well-accepted and established science, when an alternative explanation exists, in this case "anaesthesia awareness", that well fits the observation and also fits completely within very-well-accepted and established science. That's not just Occam's Razor at work, it's just common sense.

And I'm not sure why you seem to take great delight in my earlier explanation, that was on the basis that her recollections really were during the time here brain was "shut down". I stand completely by the explanation that I gave on that basis, in preference to an explanation involving a completely unknown and never detected "something" that is proposed to exist outside of our body, and that is magically not influenced by the environment outside of our body, and that communicates with our brain and memory by means never detected and unknown to science.

The moral of that, really, is to hold your nerve and not assume that any explanation is paranormal, and think a bit more about what completely rational explanation might be responsible. Then, after carefully reading what actually happened, sure enough, a perfectly rational and "natural" explanation was found. A perfect example of good science and clear, confident reasoning. After a lifetime of searching for a genuine, verifiable paranormal event, I have never found one and, as AFAIK, no one else ever has either. We should always keep that in mind, and it gives an extraordinarily strong reason to "hold one's nerve" when an apparently paranormal event is claimed, and systematically analyse the case, first establishing whether the claim is true in the first place, and looking very, very carefully for subtle explanations that are within the bounds of science. This approach has never failed me, ever, and I highly recommend it.

Sure, you made good points re it being unlikely that her chilled brain was capable of experiencing anything, and I acknowledged them, but ultimately it turned out that the "Pam" case provides only exceedingly weak (at best) evidence that consciousness exists outside of our brain.

[ytrewq]

Let me make a general comment to everyone.

I am not knocking meditation.

I accept that the practice can provide significant benefit to the user, providing a deep and very satisfying relaxation and mental experience. Enjoyable and beneficial.

But as to whether is provides evidence for anything supernatural or paranormal, well that's a very different question. I am not aware of any verifiable claim of anything supernatural or paranormal demonstrated during meditation, and none has been presented here. That is the context in which I said that perceptions and feelings don't count for anything. Of course, in other aspects of life, feelings and perceptions are very important!

So what would count as evidence that something supernatural or paranormal was going on during meditation? Potentially, a near infinity of things. For example, regularly predicting something that could not possibly have been know by other means. It could also be an observation of something that could not possibly been seen from the location of the person's eyes. And so on. There are an infinite number of ways that a supernatural/paranormal aspect of meditation could be demonstrated, but the fact of the matter is that no one ever has, and this includes a lack of evidence for the perception that one's consciousness is or can be outside of one's body and brain.

Does anyone disagree with what I wrote here?

[William]

[Replying to post 242 by ytrewq]

Does anyone disagree with what I wrote here?

I think that you are placing ideas upon how something should be and work in relation to the Panentheist idea of GOD=Consciousness by presuming that so-called "supernatural" would have anything to do with it, which allows for you to then assume the so-called "supernatural" should be able to be scientifically observed and studied in relation to the effects you are assuming should be able to happen.

A Panetheist doesn't claim consciousness = GOD is "supernatural".

[ytrewq]

[Replying to post 242 by ytrewq]

Does anyone disagree with what I wrote here?

I think that you are placing ideas upon how something should be and work in relation to the Panentheist idea of GOD=Consciousness by presuming that so-called "supernatural" would have anything to do with it, which allows for you to then assume the so-called "supernatural" should be able to be scientifically observed and studied in relation to the effects you are assuming should be able to happen.

A Panetheist doesn't claim consciousness = GOD is "supernatural".

I'm puzzled. Mt posting #242 had nothing to do with Gods, but was concerned only with meditation. With that in mind, was what I wrote reasonable?

[William]

[Replying to post 244 by ytrewq]

I'm puzzled. Mt posting #242 had nothing to do with Gods, but was concerned only with meditation.

My bad - I thought you were still engaged with the OP Title Question.

My opinion of meditation practices as to what Razor is arguing, is that there is nothing "supernatural" about that, and my understanding of what Razor has already written is that she most likely sees it that way as well.

But - carry on....

[Mithrae]

However, I'd like to bring your attention to the 'moulded speaker' in her ears. You mentioned that they did not prevent her from hearing the conversation, presumably like one would expect normal earbuds to do when playing music.
This to me sounds like (pun not intended) that you are using the paradigm of sound being a series of vibrations in the air, which are picked up by the ear-drum, which then sends electrical signals to the brain, which then interprets them.
So answer me this - how did she hear the conversation then? If, as she says, her consciousness was outside her body, this would presumably then mean she did not have access to her sensory organs, primarily her eyes and ears.
What did she report her 'vision' to be like, in this out of body mode? Was it seeing forward, with some peripheral vision, like she normally would have while in body? But how can that be? Out-of-body mode has no eyes. There's nothing picking up the light being reflected from objects. There's nothing reacting to the vibrations in the air. There's no nerves sending electrical impulses and no brain to interpret them.

What I would expect an out of body experience to be like, (presuming they're real) would be a literal blank and silent void.

Those are good points (which ytrewq also raised), and I would say that they are among the most compelling reasons to reject any kind of substance dualism - the view that mind or soul or consciousness are a fundamentally different type of stuff than physical stuff - because in such a view it is simply incoherent to talk about the two interacting with each other at all.

In a monist view however we tend to imagine either a non-conscious, objective, fysical reality (which nevertheless somehow, by means unknown, produces conscious, subjective mental experience in some places) or else a reality of which consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature. Looking at alleged out-of-body experiences from the latter perspective, it would seem that under normal circumstances human consciousness perceives reality roughly from the volume of space occupied by a human body and within the range of stimuli that body is equipped to detect; but under some circumstances, when the association with the body is weakened, that same human consciousness perceives reality from outside the body and not limited to the range of stimuli that body is equipped to detect. I'm thinking of it as, instead of being a person who is a carbon-based body, you've become a person who is the volume of space outside that body - you are everything within that region of space (at least for all intents and purposes).

But initially at least you're still the same person, the same consciousness: If you're floating outside your body, presumably it's going to take a lot longer than a couple of minutes to work out how to filter and decipher all the radio waves and gamma waves and neutrinos and dark matter occupying or passing through the volume of space from which you're currently perceiving! The tiny spectra of visible light and audible frequencies are familiar; we would surely expect that a human consciousness, suddenly occupying space outside the body and without its perceptual limitations, would nevertheless focus on and most easily interpret and remember those familiar inputs.

Imagining that consciousness outside the body should be a blank and silent void is purely a consequence of imagining that consciousness must be bound to, receive input from and be limited by a particular type of 'shell' (as ytrewq put it earlier): A consequence of imagining that the physical world outside our bodies is just fysical, just mindless matter. Like I say, those questions are a very good refutation of dualism. But absent the (unsubstantiated) assumption that the rest of reality is non-conscious, perhaps the more remarkable aspect of (alleged) OBEs is the fact that the subjects are apparently able to filter out some meaningful content at all from what could be an overwhelming sudden barrage of input.



Feel free to ignore all this in green, but your questions also reminded me of a TED talk I watched last year. As it turns out, after tracking it down and watching it again then reading some more and thinking some more, the response above is probably more appropriate, but I'll post the talk too for its own sake.
David Eagleman | TED2015
Can we create new senses for humans?
In particular it's interesting for the way it challenges some of our assumptions about perception and consciousness (or the brain):

• Okay. So what this means is this: The lesson that surfaces is that there's nothing really special or fundamental about the biology that we come to the table with. It's just what we have inherited from a complex road of evolution. But it's not what we have to stick with, and our best proof of principle of this comes from what's called sensory substitution. And that refers to feeding information into the brain via unusual sensory channels, and the brain just figures out what to do with it.
  
  Now, that might sound speculative, but the first paper demonstrating this was published in the journal Nature in 1969. So a scientist named Paul Bach-y-Rita put blind people in a modified dental chair, and he set up a video feed, and he put something in front of the camera, and then you would feel that poked into your back with a grid of solenoids. So if you wiggle a coffee cup in front of the camera, you're feeling that in your back, and amazingly, blind people got pretty good at being able to determine what was in front of the camera just by feeling it in the small of their back. Now, there have been many modern incarnations of this. The sonic glasses take a video feed right in front of you and turn that into a sonic landscape, so as things move around, and get closer and farther, it sounds like "Bzz, bzz, bzz." It sounds like a cacophony, but after several weeks, blind people start getting pretty good at understanding what's in front of them just based on what they're hearing. And it doesn't have to be through the ears: this system uses an electrotactile grid on the forehead, so whatever's in front of the video feed, you're feeling it on your forehead. Why the forehead? Because you're not using it for much else.
  
  The most modern incarnation is called the brainport, and this is a little electrogrid that sits on your tongue, and the video feed gets turned into these little electrotactile signals, and blind people get so good at using this that they can throw a ball into a basket, or they can navigate complex obstacle courses. They can come to see through their tongue. Now, that sounds completely insane, right? But remember, all vision ever is is electrochemical signals coursing around in your brain. Your brain doesn't know where the signals come from. It just figures out what to do with them.

First, just briefly to get it out of the way, since I haven't read all the posts on this thread, can you link me to this story about this Pam person? Thanks in advance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pam_Reynolds_case
The Wikipedia entry I linked to earlier

https://infidels.org/library/modern/kei ... s.html#pam
A fairly comprehensive and rather good effort at debunking/explaining it as anaesthesia awareness, from one of my posts in 2013

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/sto ... =104397005
Another link I looked over today, containing some information which implies that the infidels.org debunking may not be complete (in particular, details suggesting that Pam's experience may have continued throughout the standstill phase of her operation)

As I said from the beginning it's not conclusive evidence by any means (though also not the only such report by any means). But it's quite fascinating how readily some folk will take unsubstantiated speculation as some kind of conclusive debunking or "obvious" alternative explanation - though ytrewq's insistence on the obviousness of a physical impossibility was a rare and unexpected treat in that regard My main points in raising this example were a) that there is credible, documented evidence supporting albeit not proving the view that consciousness can exist outside of brains, and b) that views such as the one which ytrewq and I think you have been advocating require that such reports be dismissed or otherwise 'explained' to a very high level of perceived confidence - hence the "obvious" gaffe in preceding posts. (For example, if there were only three such credible reports and each was only 20% likely to be 'true,' it would still imply a 49% probability that at least one is true and consciousness does exist outside of brains.)

[Swami]

[Replying to post 237 by Razorsedge]

This is a claim from your own limited or non-experience of meditation. Ive chosen to share the more important details from what Ive learned but people find out about mundane ordinary things, like what their relative is cooking while in an OBE state, etc.

I'd like to have a discussion purely on that. Do you want to do that here, or do you want me to start a new thread? I'm leaning toward the latter, just so you can continue your discussion with ytrewq with no interruptions from myself.

It's best to have the conversation here because I want as many people to see it as possible. The other parts of this website tend to have less traffic.

I noticed you posed some questions to Mithrae that you intended to ask me about. I already made a response but I have some edits to do and sources to check. It's getting late so I will post it tomorrow.

[Mithrae]

So what would count as evidence that something supernatural or paranormal was going on during meditation? Potentially, a near infinity of things. For example, regularly predicting something that could not possibly have been know by other means. It could also be an observation of something that could not possibly been seen from the location of the person's eyes. And so on. There are an infinite number of ways that a supernatural/paranormal aspect of meditation could be demonstrated, but the fact of the matter is that no one ever has, and this includes a lack of evidence for the perception that one's consciousness is or can be outside of one's body and brain.

Does anyone disagree with what I wrote here?

We've already seen that - for some folk at least - basically any alternative explanation no matter how unsubstantiated, ad hoc or even physically impossible will be considered "obvious" in comparison to the supposedly 'paranormal' one. This thread is not an isolated incident, by any means:

In a couple of recent threads a number of folk have openly stated that even if someone were to regrow an amputated leg, they still would not consider it to be evidence of divine healing - or at least no moreso than evidence of leprechauns or magic! One said that he wouldn't consider it evidence of anything unnatural at all. Two others went even further, insisting that even if millions of Christians were suddenly 'raptured' and/or the clouds were filled by armies from heaven with Jesus at their head, it still wouldn't impress them as evidence for Christianity; they'd consider invading aliens a more likely explanation.

Such frank honesty is laudable, but it obviously undermines any claims of "no evidence" when it's clear that there is literally nothing which would be accepted as compelling evidence!

As a fundamentalist Christian lad in high school my best friend ironically was a Buddhist. I knew him for almost a decade all up; very trustworthy and smart fellow (he went on to study law and could probably still run rings around me in debate ... though I had him beat in maths at least!). Obviously we discussed religion a fair bit, and at some point we got round to exchanging personal 'miracle' stories. As much hope as I invested into them at the time, my personal 'miracles' were really just coincidences, providence at best. It actually became a bit of a running joke later on. But he told me about an occasion when he'd been back in his homeland, how his family had gone to visit a mountain monastery and he'd written a list of questions to ask the monks there; twenty I think, or maybe just a dozen or so. Apparently he went to talk to one of the monks, and without even asking him anything the monk just started answering all of the questions, one by one.

Maybe the monks had security cameras and mirrors installed to spy on any such enquirers? Maybe he'd hinted at his doubts to his mother, and she'd sneaked a peak at his list while he slept and conveyed the intelligence to the monastery beforehand? Maybe in the course of ordinary conversation the monk had touched on some of the key areas of concern and, despite his intelligence, lost in the grandeur of the monastery and the dimness of hindsight my friend inflated that into the story he told me?

Or maybe the monk perceived his concerns by means beyond the fysicalist paradigm?

[Zzyzx]

.

Maybe the monks had security cameras and mirrors installed to spy on any such enquirers?

Regardless how much I respected and trusted a friend, if someone told me that tale my reaction would be to doubt its veracity. Testimonials and anecdotes are prone to error even if well intentioned -- and, of course, cannot be verified.