Asperger's/Autism; a spiritual condition?

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At least Van der Waerden takes this story serious ...

He was primary a theologian, not a philosopher.

Those not more than physical and chemical reactions in your brain.



No - your world is made up by the activity of neuronal connections in your brain. Nothing more.



They are real as logic thinking, because logic thinking is also nothing more than neuronal connections; but: logic an scientific think provides a good model of the reality, so good that it causes the accelerating technical progress we see since this rational way has been systematically applied.

Dussel wrote:

Applied to what? The greater majority at large? The whole point of mysticism is that it is personal. It defies religion and is very personal. It should need to be tested on anyone else.
That is what Faith is after all and it is the backbone to any type of spiritual life.

There is actually a dialogue of Socrates which deals with immortality: Phaidon. But here he does not talk about reincarnation, but about an immortal soul. But :If you compare this with the Apologie, when he expresses after receiving the dead-sentence uncertainty, it quite unclear which view he really holds.



Descartes was left with such a theory, because he did not have a theory regarding the function of the brain.

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More important with Descartes and Socrates (and the other I named) is less the result than more the method of logic and sceptic investigation. The most important feature is that both did not took any "truth" for granted, but brought everything to bar of reason.



Not sure if I fully understand that statement, so I'll leave you with this.[/quote]

Riemann was a mathematician how worked extensive on multi-dimensional spaces.



You forgot the other side: If a experiment does not does lead to the results a scientific theory predicts the theory will be droped and replaced with a better model of reality.

Mysticisms/esoteric does not have a rigid method to exclude wrong theories or validate existing one. So anyone can image his version of reality, but there obviously one reality we refer to and the law of this one reality are the law everything is subject too.

The cat experiment, I forget they guy's name but he was German. He said that you could have a cat in a box, and not know if the cat was alive or dead until you looked at the cat. But if you looked at the cat, you'd influence whether the cat was alive or not. The very act of looking at something influences it. I've read of experiments with measuring photons where the researcher goes in circles since his equipment alters the photon's behavior. Science has yet to come up with a satisfactory explanation.

Modern scientists tend to dismiss anything they can't measure as unimportant. They have said that man doesn't need morals, but as we have seen man without morals is a wild animal. Science has yet to find out where morals come from. They can show a man a photo of a man being murdered, then of a loving couple, and measure what the brain does, but they can't explain WHY. That doesn't mean that there's an eternal soul that lives for eternity in some fantastic realm. That just means that there's a reason for it that we don't understand. We don't know why men seem to need gods and angels and afterlives and cats don't. We don't even know if chimps or gorillas have chimp or gorilla gods.

About 15 years ago a guy claimed that prairie dogs, burrowing rodents native to the North American Plains, were capable of rational thought. He claimed that they have a language that has words for male and female as well as abstract concepts. He was no mystic, but attempted to match prairie dog "chatter" to what they did. He claimed he could. The scientists dismissed him as bonkers. People have claimed that dolphins talk, and can even pick up sound waves from radios and repeat the songs.

I have personally observed tree squirrels apparently using reason. A squirrel is in a tree, and there is a cat at the base of the tree. What does the squirrel do? According to "science", he looks for nuts on the tree. But I have observed a squirrel weighing paths to escape from the cat, then choosing a path and following through, and successfully escaping. That requires logic. So the question becomes, if a squirrel can use logic, and therefore abstract thought, does he worship a squirrel god? If he does, then it means that mysticism is inherent in earthly life. If he has logic but not a god, then why do men have gods and squirrels not have gods?

Dussel wrote:

"We create our own reality."
-Albert Einstein

btw.
Pythagoras, Plato, and Socrates all believed in reincarnation.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ancient-soul/

Oh, and of course Jesus believed in reincarnation as well.

Umm.... he was one of the most influential philosophers of his age. In fact, Ludwig Wittgenstein said this about Kierkegaard "By far, the most profound thinker of the nineteenth century." He is considered the father of existentialism. He is considered a profound influence on the creation of existential psychology, which isn't a purely Christian invention. In fact, the number of philosophers that consider Kierkegaard an influence, all the way over to even Feyerabend and the philosophy of science, is immense, like under "Influenced" wikipedia puts this for Kierkegaard: "Most philosophers after him". That is not something people say about someone who is strictly a theologian. Heck, he is noted for arguing against Hegel, who is known for being a philosopher. So, Dussel, your comment is wrong and I do not know what else to really say but that.

Not only that, but if Kierkegaard was a theologian, then what was Nietzsche? You can't say he was a theologian. But he influenced philosophers such as Alasdair MacIntire, because of his approach to ethics.

Well, they are also themes in Magnus' mind. The mind is not physical or chemical, but self-evidently existent.


Well, Magnus' world is made up by mental states. These can be related to neural connections, but there is obviously something more than neural connections because we have a non-physical entity in existence. You can say that consciousness is caused by something physical, but it isn't physical, in and of itself, for if it were, then theories such as substance dualism would have never emerged.


How do you prove that logic provides a good model of reality? Logic is inherent in your processing of all models of reality, you cannot escape logic to model reality. The issue is that logic is a process, but consciousness is an actual thing that is directly perceived.

And some modern philosophers of science have their doubts that science actually has good methods to exclude wrong theories or validate existing ones. The notion that subjectivity is a major factor in scientific discovery is something that has been brought forward in Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, and Imre Lakatos, all of whom are major thinkers in the philosophy of science. Thomas Kuhn's book on this, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, being one of the most cited academic books of all time.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTT2-TNuegM[/youtube]

bunny.....it is these obnoxious aspies who are most likely to be the next step in evolution.

Consider this: The most obnoxious aspies are hybrids...NT/Aspie. IMO it is only a matter of time before they start playing the NTs more than the NTs are playing them. There is really nothing holding them back except brutal conditioning as children at the hands of NT bullies...and these cruel NTs are very effective culling agents for the aspie population.

When aspies are bullied, the weak ones become severely dysfunctional through psychological maiming. But the strong aspies will pass through these childhood rites of initiation relatively unscathed...except for their latent anger which can then be channeled into ambition for financial power and social prestige when they mature. Because their natural tendency toward in-depth thinking can be tapped as a productive contribution to society...they will be highly valued and much in demand. They already are in demand. As more and more of these strong aspies become powerful, successful and influencial, they will gradually begin to reproduce more aggressively.

When considering the possibility of aspies being the next step in evolution, it should be assumed the most obnoxious traits of autistics would become dominant. Why??

Because in our present civilization we reward narcissists. We make them our leaders. We like to elevate those who are narcissistic and charismatic. When you combine those traits with aspie geek aptitude you get a winning combination for the continued acceleration of a technological civilization. Granted it will take a few generations to work out the social kinks...because the hybrid NT/Aspie will need to make some minor adjustments in the social order to enable them maximum performance efficiency. And there would be no reason to prevent them from doing so.

Now the mystics among us may well be the perfect mates for these geek-narcissist hybrids. It is said opposites attract.

Holy shite! Don't wish that upon anyone.

The cat (Schrodinger's) was originally intended as a reductio of the Copenhagen Interpretation. Current thinking has replaced a lot of the Copenhagen Interpretation's balderdash with decoherence, and I do hope that some day we'll be rid of it entirely. In a decoherence framework, the situation doesn't have any of this mystical sounding stuff associated with it.


/fail

Are you saying 98% of people use Ketamine, LSD, mushrooms, and MDA?

Maybe where you come from.

Physical and chemical influences can change and alter our mind (ageing, drugs, injuries, etc.). Specific influences do cause very specific alterations - the dementia caused by ageing is different than the dementia caused by Alzheimer or drug abuse. A lobotomy lead to two separated minds in one head, other specific injuries do have very specific alterations of the mind. The same is to say for drugs (legal and illegal). A few atoms more or less on a molecule can alter the very specific influence of this substance in the mind drastically to an other and similar specific way.

If our mind is not a function on a mere physical and chemical level, how this, in some cases very specific, alterations can happen? If our mind would something "outside" the physical world there should be something remaining which could not be altered, but there is nothing which could not be altered this way. Therefore we must conclude that our mind is at the end nothing more than a very complex physical process.



The process runs via the validation of our predictions: When I apply a logic reasoning in e.g. calculating the temperature of a boiler at a given state and I measure an other temperature than I know that something in my reasoning was wrong. The constant feedback from the empirical world provides us humans with a correction mechanism which erases the logical flaws in our model of the world.