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Grex > Agora56 > #84: Newspaper in Denmark prints cartoon pics of Mohammed | |
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| 25 new of 432 responses total. |
gull
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response 296 of 432:
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Feb 16 00:27 UTC 2006 |
Re resp:274: The evidence is currently far from clear. If one is to
believe the Bible, God used to prove his existence with all kinds of
interesting miracles, but He doesn't seem to see fit to do that any
more.
It's also hard to see how free will can fit in with the doctrine that
everything follows a plan preordained by an omnipotent, omniscient God.
Re resp:277: There's evidence that we act first, and *then* rationalize
our actions -- the motor centers of the brain "light up" before the
cognitive ones, suggesting that our conscious mind has very little
control over what we're actually doing; it just sort of comes along
later and decides why we did it.
There are also some interesting split brain experiments, involving
people who have had the connection between their right and left
hemispheres damaged. The left and right eyes are shown different
images, and the person is asked to draw what he's seeing with his left
hand. Of course, he draws what he's seeing through his left eye, but
when asked why he drew it, he has to use his left brain's language
centers to come up with the answer -- and the left brain can only see
the image being shown to the right eye. The subject usually comes up
with a highly convoluted rationalization for what he drew, and seems to
firmly believe it.
All this suggests to me that free will *may* be an illusion. It's a
pretty disturbing idea.
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keesan
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response 297 of 432:
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Feb 16 00:30 UTC 2006 |
There are more than five senses, and taste and smell share sensors. Touch:
perception of heat, pressure, pain, possibly also electricity or magnetism,
gravity. There are also receptors for pheromones.
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kingjon
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response 298 of 432:
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Feb 16 00:47 UTC 2006 |
Re #296: As I understand the Bible's teachings, God didn't use miracles to
establish his existence, but rather to establish his *primacy* in the Old
Testament and his *identity* in the New. I already gave you several possible
explanations for this "problem" that seemed reasonable to *me*, at least.
Fitting free will in with omniscience and omnipotence is one of the major
problems of Christian philosophy and theology. I'm grateful that it isn't *my*
problem.
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gull
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response 299 of 432:
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Feb 16 00:53 UTC 2006 |
I guess I was never destined to be religious. I'm just not capable of
ignoring problems like that with my basic belief system. How free will
fit in with God's plan is the kind of thing that kept me up at
night...especially considering that His plan seems to *require* a
certain number of people to go to Hell, since presumably He knows from
the start whether you're destined to believe or not.
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kingjon
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response 300 of 432:
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Feb 16 00:58 UTC 2006 |
My personal view on it is that there is no conflict, but the _prima facie_
conflict is enough to drive some people away.
If there are two things which I think I know to be true that seem to be in
conflict, in my experience either one of them will lose its seeming-veracity or
the apparent conflict will vanish.
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rcurl
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response 301 of 432:
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Feb 16 06:09 UTC 2006 |
Re #285: Jon wrote: "There may be some relevance in thinking of free will
as a neurobiological question, but your claim of "no evidence" betrays,
again, your assumption that nothing nonphysical, immaterial, etc. can
possibly exist."
I never said that. Information is at least not material, and it definitely
exists in the forms of the *relations* between physical entities. It is
made quantitative in the concept of entropy in thermodynamics, and is
obviously fundamental to life functions.
Re #288: Jon says gods "can't (normally) be perceived with any of the
physical senses, but there aren't words for the sort of perception used to
perceive" them. There certainly is a word. it is "imagination".
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kingjon
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response 302 of 432:
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Feb 16 20:27 UTC 2006 |
Re #301: I included such things you mentioned there in my "etc."
"Imagination" has a perfectly good meaning already; it is used to describe
things, persons, and situations that don't exist and are known by the person
imagining them to not exist. Since I believe that God exists, it can't be
imagination.
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marcvh
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response 303 of 432:
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Feb 16 20:43 UTC 2006 |
OK, but the word for perceptions which are not the result of any
external sensory stimulus and which are believed by the subject to be
real is "hallucination." Is that any better?
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kingjon
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response 304 of 432:
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Feb 16 20:45 UTC 2006 |
No, because it includes the necessary precondition of the perceptions not being
real. Besides, hallucination isn't stimuli not received by the normal senses,
but false stimuli received by them.
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marcvh
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response 305 of 432:
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Feb 16 20:59 UTC 2006 |
The "not the normal senses" constraint brings us right back to ESP,
I'm afraid. You may dislike it but it's a whole lot more accurate than
"see."
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cyklone
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response 306 of 432:
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Feb 16 21:37 UTC 2006 |
Klingon has a whole lot to learn. There is an entire body of psychology
called NLP that explains quite clearly that his definition of
"imagination" is incomplete, if not entirely wrong. In addition, the
phrase "dreams into reality" reflects that for some, imagination has a
very close connection to reality. Finally, as a musician who
"hallucinates" or "imagines" songs that I make real, his definitions are
false. I guess music doesn't really exist in his world, although I'm
curious where he thinks the music he likes comes from.
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bru
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response 307 of 432:
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Feb 16 22:03 UTC 2006 |
second sight
extra sensory perception
womens intuition
Hunch
all are used to refer to feelings or ideas we get from non-direct stimuli.
In many cases, this may also be refered to as experience. Police stop and
talk to possible perpetrators because years of experience gives them the
ability to recognize certain tell tale signs that this is a person of
interest. He has a hunch.
A woman thinks there is something wrong with her child because he is not
acting normal. Womens intuition. her experience in dealing with this person
closely on a daily basis has told her something isn't right.
esp and second sight are probably closely related to the above. Teh brain
has made a perceptual link between his personal observations and his logic
center.
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rcurl
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response 308 of 432:
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Feb 16 23:20 UTC 2006 |
At least Jon now writes "Since I believe that God exists, it can't be
imagination", which means that he just believes it and it isn't an
"absolute truth" anymore, but it can still be just his imagination. People
imagine many things to be true - and consequently believe them. Many
superstitions, including Jon's, are in that category.
I mentioned earlier Dennett's new book (resp 200) "Breaking the Spell -
Religion as a Natural Phenomenon". Coincidentally there appears in the
Mar-Apr 2006 issue of American Scientist the article "The Cognitive
Psychology of Belief in the Supernatural" by Jesse Bering. "Supernatural"
here includes deities, ghosts, afterlife, etc. The gist of the article is
that such superstitions seem to have had evolutionary advantages, and are
therefore Darwinian adaptations of early humans.
Such superstitions arise from the awareness of other's awareness, called
"theory of mind", and result in attaching agency first to people and then
to inanimate objects and finally to imaginary beings.
Bering illustrates he evolutionary advantage by several examples. One is,
if an early human is walking in the woods and a branch drops nearby, this
could be interpreted as caused by the wind or by a threat from an animal
or another human - that is, to a malevolent agency. It is advantageous to
attribute the event to agency as then the reaction will be one of
heightened awareness and preparation for fight or flight. Those humans
that have a heightened response of this nature will have an advantage in
surviving and reproducing, and the trait will increase in frequency in the
population by this natural selection.
Bering gives many more examples, most from psychological experiments, in
which even people that are firm extinctivists (believing that all sensient
existence ends at death) can be induced to repond as if there are ghosts
or "spirits".
It is interesting that the belief in gods and other superstitions appear
to be the consequence of Darwinian evolution in early humans.
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keesan
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response 309 of 432:
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Feb 17 01:17 UTC 2006 |
Jon, how do you prove your stimuli were real, when nobody else has any
evidence of them, rather than hallucinations? Just believing you saw
something does not prove that you saw it.
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kingjon
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response 310 of 432:
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Feb 17 01:39 UTC 2006 |
Re #308: Rephrase that: If God exists, then my experiences aren't
hallucinations. (They can't be imagination, since they are believed to be
true.)
An explanation of a possible mechanism is not the same thing as the proof that
it happened that way.
Re #309: I can't prove that my experiences were real -- but then again I can't
prove that *any* experience I've ever had has been real.
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marcvh
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response 311 of 432:
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Feb 17 02:09 UTC 2006 |
Re #310: Do you know the meaning of the phrase "assuming what you
are trying to prove"?
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kingjon
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response 312 of 432:
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Feb 17 02:19 UTC 2006 |
I'm not trying to prove that God exists -- I know it to be true, and if anyone
else doesn't believe it, well, that's their problem, and one I can't help -- on
the order of being convinced that east is west, but still. What I am doing is
vigorously pointing out and objecting to arguments on the order of "nothing
that cannot be subjected to double-blind scientific analysis exists, therefore
God does not exist".
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marcvh
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response 313 of 432:
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Feb 17 02:54 UTC 2006 |
Anyone who mixes up East and West is not necessarily mistaken, he may
just be a Mahjong player. :)
You are trying to explain why you believe in God (you have said that
you have "seen" him, and have "met" him.) This is not identical to
"proving" him but it certainly embodies similar characteristics. If you
believe he exists because of a reasoning process which includes his
existence as one of its premises, that's certainly your right but it's
not going to impress many people.
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kingjon
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response 314 of 432:
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Feb 17 03:02 UTC 2006 |
And it's also the "reasoning" process that everyone uses to "prove" that any
person exists -- and it isn't reasoning at all. If you try to formalize it, of
course it sounds silly. If you were to try to explain why any particular person
you know (or any particular famous person you have met) exists (and in the case
of famous people, isn't just someone the industry has made up).
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scholar
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response 315 of 432:
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Feb 17 04:13 UTC 2006 |
Re. 310: You can be hallucinating whether or not God exists, for the simple
fact that, even if he does exist, you can't be sure that you have actually
perceived him and don't merely think you have.
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mary
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response 316 of 432:
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Feb 17 11:13 UTC 2006 |
No, it's not the reasoning process that everyone uses to prove existence.
You have set your standards of determining what's real to allow your
beliefs to flourish. Works for you. But it's certainly not good enough
for everyone.
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kingjon
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response 317 of 432:
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Feb 17 12:02 UTC 2006 |
Re #315: I understand hallucination as one's normal senses giving false
sensations, while what I described was sensations not coming from my normal
senses.
Re #316: Like I said, it isn't sufficient to prove, but proof is never required
for any other cases.
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keesan
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response 318 of 432:
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Feb 17 13:18 UTC 2006 |
We have a neighbor who thinks her dreams are put into her head from somewhere
else and therefore have significance.
I can prove Jim exists to anyone who wants to stop by and meet him - see,
hear, touch, smell, taste - which are senses most of us have in common.
If I were the only one to see him, other people might consider it a
hallucination.
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marcvh
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response 319 of 432:
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Feb 17 15:48 UTC 2006 |
Of course proof is required. When you enrolled at Calvin College they
required you to produce evidence that you exist, that you are who you say
you are, and most importantly that you will pay for the services you recieve
there. People expect proof of such things all the time in lots of ways;
they just don't require it in every social situation because it's
considered a bit rude.
"Celebrity you have never met" has a lower standard of proof because it has
a lower standard of mattering. I haven't taken much trouble to verify that
Tom Cruise actually exists because the claims about him are not particulalry
extraordinary (he's just a man) and because it's not important. If it turned
out that there's no such person as Tom Cruise and he's just a CGI effect, it
would not have any meaningful impact on my life. Would it have one on yours?
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kingjon
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response 320 of 432:
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Feb 17 20:04 UTC 2006 |
Re #319: A college is an institution. Once you start introducing
impersonal institutions, it confuses matters. Besides, I would consider
all that you mention "demonstration" rather than "proof" -- it would be
possible that all the evidence be counterfeit, say.
You'll notice I didn't say "celebrity," I said "famous person". What I was
trying to get at is "someone who you're likely to meet at most once in a
lifetime, but is nonetheless important." Since I don't consider actors to
be important, I was thinking more on the order of political figures.
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