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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Nov 15, 2015 - 01:36pm PT
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For millions of years, humans thought that the world was flat.
That's not really an argument. For millions of years humans thought the ocean was salty and guess what, it is.
The argument I was making is that we recognize within us a uniqueness or individuality that can be described as soul or is perhaps mistaken for soul. If that entity of uniqueness isn't a part of each of us then how can anything be thought of as subjective? In order for subjective observation of anything there must be a subject. It's that subject and what it is that's the issue: why isn't it appropriate to refer to it as soul its eternal nature aside?
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Nov 15, 2015 - 04:42pm PT
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For millions of years, humans thought that the world was flat.
Sure some prolly did. But have 100% of humans ever agreed 100% on anything?
I'll bet you a cheeseburger you don't think fracking is changing the climate!
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Nov 15, 2015 - 05:05pm PT
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Nov 8, 2015 - 10:58am PT
How can one know that the universe is a closed ('finite'?) system?
Find and point out the edges, of course.
The assumption that its infinite seems, well, a leap of faith.
What's beyond? None that have been can say...
DMT
Duh Dingust, if the universe started from a BB from the size of a cue ball, like that Cosmos dude said it did(Tyson Deengus), then it is finite! which would mean any No-Thing outside of that cue ball would have to be finite, or infinite?
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WBraun
climber
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Nov 15, 2015 - 05:11pm PT
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You can never trust a material scientist cause when new evidence comes along, they change their minds!
Muwahahahah .....
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Nov 15, 2015 - 07:51pm PT
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And one should never trust a duck, for all they do is quack.
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WBraun
climber
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Nov 15, 2015 - 07:54pm PT
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The very true nature of a duck is to quack, thus they are trustworthy .....
Muwahahahha
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Nov 16, 2015 - 08:42am PT
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The argument I was making is that we recognize within us a uniqueness or individuality that can be described as soul or is perhaps mistaken for soul. If that entity of uniqueness isn't a part of each of us then how can anything be thought of as subjective? In order for subjective observation of anything there must be a subject. It's that subject and what it is that's the issue: why isn't it appropriate to refer to it as soul its eternal nature aside?
Paul, my point was, even though people may believe in something, that doesn't mean that they are correct. That is at the root of the problem of naked belief. It isn't reliable. It just requires faith. In the absence of physical evidence, that is all that there is. Faith. It doesn't mean that it is wrong. It just means that you should have an argument ready, because you have no physical evidence that you are correct.
Conversely, you may take comfort in the fact that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, I will give you that. Carl Sagan wrote it, but for those who live with faith, feel free to use it.
I know the feeling that I am an individual. A sentient person, feeling that I am independent of the outside world. What does that mean? Is there a me-ness that transcends the physical world? You seem to be arguing that. Perhaps there is no soul. There is only our sentience, which dies when the brain dies. For those who believe otherwise, please present a well reasoned answer.
I honestly don't want to influence Go-B's, or Werner's, or anyone's beliefs. I know that it is something that gives them happiness and purpose. However, like the flat earth, it could easily be wrong.
Most religions are totally exclusive. Toe the word of god or pay the price. What do you Christians think of Werner? Is he praying to false Gods and heading for eternal damnation?
We do a lot of general talk about religion here, but not too much on specifics. Perhaps someone should start applying the word of god as told to Moses around here. It would be interesting.
Paul, tell me why you feel that we have a soul? It is a widely held belief, so you should have no problem finding arguments for it on the web, even well written and well thought out arguments. Actually, any of you who hold that belief should please chime in.
I must admit that I am trespassing on this thread. It belongs on the God vs. Science thread. However, it fits today's posts.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Nov 16, 2015 - 09:47am PT
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The Abrahamic religions are not tolerant but others are. Between them, India, China, Japan, and the little tigers of east Asia represent more than half of humanity and their religions are tolerant so that is something to be thankful for.
And here's a question that has had me thinking for some time now. If the universe and human life really are purposeless as so many here maintain, and free will does not exist, what does it matter what we believe as long as we don't cause problems for someone else? Why would a scientist even care if a New Ager has unscientific beliefs?
If a person does not care to know the most logical and rational and up to date theories of how things work, what does it matter anyway?
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Nov 16, 2015 - 11:24am PT
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I know the feeling that I am an individual. A sentient person, feeling that I am independent of the outside world. What does that mean? Is there a me-ness that transcends the physical world? You seem to be arguing that. Perhaps there is no soul. There is only our sentience, which dies when the brain dies. For those who believe otherwise, please present a well reasoned answer.
I am arguing that what you describe as individual sentience is the source for the belief in soul. I'm not arguing here for an eternal nature. I'm saying that sentient individuality is the element within us that might be enriched and or might be degraded by our actions. That care of that "soul" in terms of behavior is important to us and, I suspect, has always been important to much if not most of humanity. When you commit an act in violation of your own personal moral compass you know it and you feel damaged as a result.
I would agree that you can't declare something true simply because people "believe" it to be true, but neither can you say the opposite. The thing about soul is that belief or knowledge of sentient individuality is the personal observation of all humanity.That is a kind of evidence. Again, I'm not talking immortality, I'm simply observing the separateness and personal uniqueness of our experience. Whether you believe it eternal or not that "soul" as personal experience seems to exist for all.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Nov 16, 2015 - 01:22pm PT
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In regard to jgill's question and paul's idea of the universality of the notion of a soul, at the least these are universal features of the human mind/brain.
If jgill saw a star surrounded by a blue circle, the spiritual interpretation would be he was hit hard enough to begin the process of the soul leaving. That star is also known as the third eye and the 6th chakra. Many people meditate for years before they see it.
That particular symbol is separate from the grids one sees upon pressing their eyelids, which may or may not be maps of nerves or neurons in either the eye or the brain.
Once one begins meditating and seeing unusual things, it's self evident that all the major religions share certain symbols and colors and that these are based on internal experiences.
Are these universal internal experiences doors to another dimension or simply the workings of the brain? That is the never ending question.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Nov 16, 2015 - 01:57pm PT
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Ed said:
energy is physical
you made an equivalence that physical=material and attributed it to me... but I never said that it was.
You really don't get it, do you...
No, I don't.
My experiential understanding of energy is that it is a quantity that is transferred from system to system - which I believe squares with the physics definition.
Are you saying that energy itself is a physical object or a physical thing, i.e., a photon is a physical thing that HAS luminosity, etc. Or rather, that physical objects and things have energy?
How would you define the difference between physical objects and energy?
JL
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Nov 16, 2015 - 02:14pm PT
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That care of that "soul" in terms of behavior is important to us and, I suspect, has always been important to much if not most of humanity.
The word "soul" used in this way only adds to the ephemeral nature of this word. If for you personally the soul does not mean what it typically connotes in general parlance , that is, as an incorporeal element within an individual person, having to do with other worlds,and so on--- then it should made clear that you are conscripting the use of this word for your own purposes, which is fine, but otherwise some rather profound misunderstandings could inevitably arise.
I am assuming , from your description, that you do not mean the soul in an otherwise mystical way but rather as representing more or less mundane states of mind and personality, etc..
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Nov 16, 2015 - 03:14pm PT
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How would you define the difference between physical objects and energy?
(JL)
Don't you love it when two physicists carry on a conversation on this thread?
That particular symbol is separate from the grids one sees upon pressing their eyelids, which may or may not be maps of nerves or neurons in either the eye or the brain (Jan)
Thanx for the answer, Jan. I wasn't aware that maps of nerves or neurons had the extremely regular patterns seen in the eyelids. That the brain would produce such images is one of its mysteries I suppose.
This recently popped up from my experiments expanding a peculiar continued fraction that I conjured up, and involved the basic trig functions, but in the complex plane.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Nov 17, 2015 - 09:05pm PT
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Oh oh. I thought the image was pretty, but it scared everyone off.
;>(
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Nov 18, 2015 - 01:15am PT
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I remember years ago there was someone with a questionaire in Psychology Today that was part of someone's research project on what sorts of patterns one saw when pressing one's eyelids and also when letting the shower spray one's closed eyelids. They also wanted to know if you had experience meditating or not. I remember seeing a perfectly symmetrical black and white check pattern from water in the shower.
It is indeed a mystery of why the symmetry which doesn't resemble any known models of the nerves or neurons, or even the pattern of blood vessels one can see in their eyes when opthamalogists shine bright lights in them. Paul is always talking about the beauty in symmetry so perhaps that merely reflects a symmetry the assymetric systems of the brain manage to create.
And then there is the Japanese concept of beauty in their nature arts which relies on assymetry always??
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Nov 18, 2015 - 02:46am PT
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The thing about soul is that belief or knowledge of sentient individuality is the personal observation of all humanity.That is a kind of evidence. Again, I'm not talking immortality, I'm simply observing the separateness and personal uniqueness of our experience. Whether you believe it eternal or not that "soul" as personal experience seems to exist for all.
I'd say it's identity, but various synonyms apply equally well. And I can't really think of anyone who has an issue with that notion per se, but rather with claims that 'identity' represents something eternal or universal (not that I can blame anyone for being concerned about a world without me in it).
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Nov 18, 2015 - 06:37am PT
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It is indeed a mystery of why the symmetry which doesn't resemble any known models of the nerves or neurons, or even the pattern of blood vessels one can see in their eyes when ophthalmologists shine bright lights in them. Paul is always talking about the beauty in symmetry so perhaps that merely reflects a symmetry the asymmetric systems of the brain manage to create.
And then there is the Japanese concept of beauty in their nature arts which relies on asymmetry always??
It should be no mystery that much of how our brain works is still a mystery. There have been many many surprises already in the study of the brain and more are sure to come.
Does this resemble symmetry?
rods and cones in electron micrograph section of primate retina
In [1964} Japanese neurophysiologist Tsuneo Tomita, working at Keio University in Tokyo, first succeeded in getting a microelectrode inside the cones of a fish, with a result so surprising that many contemporaries at first seriously doubted it.
Tomita had been trying, as was the custom in his field, to get the tip of a micro-electrode into the cone cells by slowly pushing it down from above with a micro-manipulator. Every time the tip of the electrode penetrated the cell membrane it injured the cone so badly that the cell quit responding. Tomita wondered if perhaps the situation was like trying to get a fork into a tough tomato. He tried lowering the tip of the electrode just until it met resistance and then bumped the base which the retina was sitting on upwards. That worked. At a meeting he is reported to have said, "If Mohammed not come to mountain, then mountain come to Mohammed."
The surprise which Tomita discovered was that the membrane potential of the cone became hyperpolarized rather than depolarized when stimulated with light. That is, the cell was inhibited rather than excited by light.
Another mystery of vision:
...we have long known that a fully dark-adapted human can see a brief flash of light so feeble that no single receptor can have received more than 1 photon of light. Calculations show that about six closely spaced rods must be stimulated, each by a photon of light, within a short time, to produce a visible flash. It now becomes clear how a single photon can excite a rod enough to make it emit a significant signal.
Mystery requires work to see into. The rewards are great.
Perhaps a few years from now students of biology will regard this entire story of the receptors as one more thing to learn—I hope not. To appreciate fully its impact, it helps to have spent the years wondering how the receptors could possibly work; then suddenly, in the space of a decade or less of spectacular research, it all unfolds. The sense of excitement still has not subsided.
And the mystery will continue.
The output of the eye, after two or three synapses, contains information that is far more sophisticated than the punctate representation of the world encoded in the rods and cones. What is especially interesting to me is the unexpectedness of the results, as reflected in the failure of anyone before Kuffler to guess that something like center-surround receptive fields could exist or that the optic nerve would virtually ignore anything so boring as diffuse-light levels. By the same token, no one made any guesses that even closely approximated what was to come at the next levels along the path—in the brain. It is this unpredictability that makes the brain fascinating—that plus the ingenuity of its workings once we have uncovered them.
italic text from
Eye, Brain, and Vision
David Hubel
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Nov 18, 2015 - 08:21am PT
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That the eye senses visual information is a given and how it senses that information is all very fascinating but irrelevant to the ultimate mystery of the perception of that information by what? Who or what is watching the screen of our vision? What is it that is cataloging that visual information and constructing decisions based on analysis? The experience of visual information is far more mysterious than the sensory apparatus that allows it to happen. And those things seem to be distinctly different from one another in the way that mind, though mortally tied to brain, seems different than brain as well.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Nov 18, 2015 - 10:09am PT
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I'd be interested to hear from healeyje whether he ever saw symmetrical patterns during his hours in the sensory deprivation tanks or only images similar to what one sees in ordinary life or dreams.
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