Thoughts please.....

[smokeyparkin]

Conscious thought is defiantly a strange phenomenon that I am completely interested in looking into because the idea of reality appears very impossible when seriously looking at it. But what people need to realise is that Christianity and believing a man’s “Sexed up” plight to form a religion outside of the common beliefs of the time is wrong.

Lets stop listening to answers that are 2000 years old; god hasn’t spoken from a bush. We have dismissed all possible re-births of the messier as mad men!!!

So why do we still try to live our lives from a book that contains common sense moralistic values and over exaggerated stories 500 years from the original source? There was not one person that wrote a gospel that actually knew Jesus Christ. Christianity spread for 500 years without any source of code of Christianity conduct written until the pope of the time ordered the new testament to be created, this was all based on popular Christianity stories at the time, mainly the crowd pleasers (certainly the ones about forgiveness and repent of sins, things people were very interested in at the time, and gave money to be forgiven... Totally wrong)!!!

So the next time you hear about your friend Bob who knows someone who has heard of somebody that might be the strongest guy ever…. Think again.

The Bible is wrong. Lets start looking for truth again!!!!!

I am not an atheist; I do not understand life or the meaning of it. One thing I am sure of is that we are on a spinning rock of metal and dust being pulled in by the value zero, orbiting a small sun in a galaxy of billions, in a universe of billions looking toward exaggerated stories as answers to define everything’s existence…

It is so depressing to see just how far behind we really are….

I'd like some thoughts on my thoughts please.....

[Bugmaster]

What exactly is "agent causation", anyway ? It seems to me that the very notion of it presupposes that dualism is true, but I could be wrong.

[QED]

It's funny how, no matter which thread I read, it always ends up with harvey1 and QED arguing about materialism

Since the turn of the previous century it's been all to easy for supernaturalists to jump on bandwagon of the "New Physics" and pull the rug from under the feet of the materialist. I view this as a shallow exercise though. The materialist was wrong all along, that's quite easy to support but it doesn't mean that the supernaturalist is right by default.

I think that the entire concept of immaterial things, which cannot be detected a priori, is a red herring. I see superstrings and such as material entities -- though very different from rocks and such. I see no reason to believe that Platonic immaterial entities exist at all.

That doesn't really help to resolve the issue though. The gross appearance of whatever micro-structure actually exists is what we call material. Harvey will say that the structure itself consists of something conforming to platonic rather than mechanical laws. But note that when the pioneers of the New Physics coined the term Quantum Mechanics, I think they were deliberately keeping a material bias.

Can it not be the case that there is a third state which eludes definition at this time, but accounts for the apparent duality we see just about everywhere we look?

There could be, but I'd need some evidence in order to contemplate it seriously.

Well, you reject the immaterial yet the material has its own set of problems (like the virtual particles that intercede in QED transactions). This sort of behaviour at the quantum scale is difficult to label as being material. But neither is it spiritual either!

[harvey1]

In your haste to pin that particular label on me you seem to have overlooked three important little words I chose to use. I've emphasized them for you above... no hand is at work behind the scenes in a wide range of self-organizing systems.

Okay, but then this seems as though you are moving back to a purely materialist perspective. If you're saying that there is a duality principle between material and immaterial, that's pantheism. If you are saying that there is no duality principle at work for the material world, then that's materialism.

What name do we give to the fallacy of thinking by false analogy? When we say things like natural selection knows which genes are best suited for a particular job or a pile of sand understands the optimum slope or a photon tries to go in a straight line we do not literally mean these things possess something like a human brain. But there are some people who do take it that way -- including you apparently.

Who's "we" Kimosabe? If you say that optimum slopes conform to some least action, then there is an implicit consciousness in this since reference since the events are not based on constant conjunction, but rather are based on a proposition being true. If you suggest that constant conjunction is the reason why certain things try to go in a straight line, then you are back to materialism (i.e., material things just behave... er... materially). On the other hand, if you say that there is an equation (proposition) that dictates how reality must be, then you are saying that propositions exist. And, as I've mentioned before, propositions are only propositions if they are understood by a mind. (Otherwise, a proposition doesn't exist.)

[Aristarkos]

I am by no means a great thinker, and I find it a little annoying that some great people are being filtered in life because of their faith. It would be good to see a group of open-minded individuals actually come up with a structured religion -- new, fresh and relevant. That isn't based on the messages from god. But the search for them.. "We have no idea where god is, he hasn't spoken to man apparently in a few hundred years -- but we're gonna find him!!!"

Have you heard of Unitarian Universalists? http://www.uua.org/aboutuu
At a UU church you find a mix of people from different world religions. http://www.uua.org/aboutuu/uufaq.html
No one is asked to subscribe to a faith creed. Instead we agree to some basic moralistic principles. http://www.uua.org/aboutuua/principles.html I believe these principles are a simple outgrowth of the love and compassion found at the heart of every world religion. UUs don't claim to have all the answers, but they ask great questions!

[QED]

Okay, but then this seems as though you are moving back to a purely materialist perspective. If you're saying that there is a duality principle between material and immaterial, that's pantheism. If you are saying that there is no duality principle at work for the material world, then that's materialism.

But that's just the corner you're trying to paint me into. To me it's no big deal that the material world is contradicted by QM. If it's a Holographic universe, so beit, rocks only seem hard because that's how their projection affects ours. Ultimately it's not material concretethat stops us walking through walls but forces, OK, so the world is purely immaterial. That also does away with "duality" in my opinion.

Who's "we" Kimosabe?

That'd be the Royal We

If you say that optimum slopes conform to some least action, then there is an implicit consciousness in this since reference since the events are not based on constant conjunction, but rather are based on a proposition being true.

Least action can also be understood in terms of the phase of little spinning vectors! But are they material, immaterial or neither?

If you suggest that constant conjunction is the reason why certain things try to go in a straight line, then you are back to materialism (i.e., material things just behave... er... materially). On the other hand, if you say that there is an equation (proposition) that dictates how reality must be, then you are saying that propositions exist. And, as I've mentioned before, propositions are only propositions if they are understood by a mind. (Otherwise, a proposition doesn't exist.)

Yes, I've heard you mention that many times before and it still doesn't make sense to me on anything other than a linguistic level.

[QED]

Okay, but then this seems as though you are moving back to a purely materialist perspective. If you're saying that there is a duality principle between material and immaterial, that's pantheism. If you are saying that there is no duality principle at work for the material world, then that's materialism.

But isn't that just a corner you're trying to paint me into? To me it's no big deal that the material world is contradicted by QM. If it's a Holographic universe, then so be it. Rocks only seem hard because that's how their projection affects ours. Ultimately it's not material concrete that stops us walking through walls but forces, OK, so the world is purely immaterial. That also does away with "duality" in my opinion.

Who's "we" Kimosabe?

That'd be the Royal We

If you say that optimum slopes conform to some least action, then there is an implicit consciousness in this since reference since the events are not based on constant conjunction, but rather are based on a proposition being true.

Least action can also be understood in terms of the phase of little spinning vectors! But are they material, immaterial or neither?

If you suggest that constant conjunction is the reason why certain things try to go in a straight line, then you are back to materialism (i.e., material things just behave... er... materially). On the other hand, if you say that there is an equation (proposition) that dictates how reality must be, then you are saying that propositions exist. And, as I've mentioned before, propositions are only propositions if they are understood by a mind. (Otherwise, a proposition doesn't exist.)

Yes, I've heard you mention that many times before and it still doesn't make sense to me on anything other than a linguistic level.

[harvey1]

But isn't that just a corner you're trying to paint me into? To me it's no big deal that the material world is contradicted by QM. If it's a Holographic universe, then so be it. Rocks only seem hard because that's how their projection affects ours. Ultimately it's not material concrete that stops us walking through walls but forces, OK, so the world is purely immaterial. That also does away with "duality" in my opinion.

So, I'm confused. Prior to this point we dealt with three possible ontologies: materialism, platonism, or a duality existing between materialism and platonism. You said you favored a duality, and now seem to want to get back to materialism. Can you state exactly the kind of ontology that you favor?

Least action can also be understood in terms of the phase of little spinning vectors! But are they material, immaterial or neither?

Well, that's a question you ought to answer yourself. As I've said, least action is a proposition that exists, and as a result of that least action proposition existing the world behaves that way. If you take this materialist approach, then I think you ought to be consistent.

Yes, I've heard you mention that many times before and it still doesn't make sense to me on anything other than a linguistic level.

I'm not sure why this doesn't make sense to you. If I said the proposition is meaningless, you would certainly understood that to mean that the proposition could not be understood by any rational mind. In other words, proposition is language, and language only exists if there are minds. If language exists objectively, then how could a mind not possibly exist? Language doesn't exist if there are no minds.

[Bugmaster]

Well, you reject the immaterial yet the material has its own set of problems (like the virtual particles that intercede in QED transactions). This sort of behaviour at the quantum scale is difficult to label as being material. But neither is it spiritual either!

Aw... But I label them as material anyway :-( Can't we actually detect the virtual particles (albeit indirectly), by measuring the radiation given off by black holes ?

[Bugmaster]

If you say that optimum slopes conform to some least action, then there is an implicit consciousness in this since reference since the events are not based on constant conjunction, but rather are based on a proposition being true.

I'm not sure I understand what this means. Are you saying that, without a consciousness guiding every grain of sand, the sand wouldn't form neat piles, but would just spread all over the place ?

[Bugmaster]

So, I'm confused. Prior to this point we dealt with three possible ontologies: materialism, platonism, or a duality existing between materialism and platonism.

No, there's at least one more option: that materialism and Platonism are both false, and there exists some third substance, whose behaviors we misinterpret as materialism some times, and Platonism some other times. I think this is what QED is saying, but I could be wrong. Nonetheless, it's a possibility.

As I've said, least action is a proposition that exists, and as a result of that least action proposition existing the world behaves that way.

Yeah, you've said that, but you still haven't justified it to my liking. As you know, I believe that "least action", "F=ma", etc., are just made-up models that we use to approximate pieces of the material world. They don't have an independent existence.

If I said the proposition is meaningless, you would certainly understood that to mean that the proposition could not be understood by any rational mind.

Hmm, is that right ? I perfectly understand the proposition, "This sentence is false", and yet it is meaningless, because it cannot possibly be true. Similarly, "square circles exist" is a perfectly comprehensible statement that is nonetheless meaningless.

In other words, proposition is language, and language only exists if there are minds. If language exists objectively, then how could a mind not possibly exist?

My answer, of course, would be that language does not exist objectively. In fact, there are good reasons to believe that, since people invent new languages all the time, such as Esperanto or Quenya or Klingon.