Feeling of truth and spiritual substance

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circular
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11 Sep 2012, 1:14 pm

Tensu wrote:

circular wrote:

I don't think so. If there is something spiritual, the claim that it is of different nature depending on the religion, i.e. culture, is not acceptable without a full explanation of this because the spirit is not of different nature depending on the culture.

You don't know that.

Do you think my mind is not of the same nature as your mind ?

techstepgenr8tion wrote:

The only problem with your last part is its not a concept arrived at from postulation. If this was something someone dreamed up as a theory to plug some gaps this would throw that theory out the window. What you have instead of postulation is a bunch of prolific NDE'ers, including neuroscientists, claiming this exact thing, same thing many prolific mediums claim, that channeled messages claim, etc..

Testimony is not proof. And it is not a valid way of overriding the rules of logic. Moreover, the stories told around NDEs are likely to be influenced by what has been heard. Like the tunnel with a light. Everybody knows that, so it has an amplifying effect.

Tensu
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11 Sep 2012, 1:23 pm

circular wrote:

Tensu wrote:

circular wrote:

You don't know that.

Do you think my mind is not of the same nature as your mind ?

I wouldn't know. We are all clueless as to the internal experiences of others.

techstepgenr8tion
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11 Sep 2012, 1:28 pm

circular wrote:

Tensu wrote:

circular wrote:

You don't know that.

Do you think my mind is not of the same nature as your mind ?

techstepgenr8tion wrote:

I guess I have to ask you then; what makes you believe any of it enough to bother picking through the details?

Robdemanc
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11 Sep 2012, 2:54 pm

How do you feel when you watch the sun set, or sit quietly during dawn or dusk on a fine day? When there is a hint of the new day over the horizon, or the last rays of light are slowly dwindling, I often feel calm and at peace. This is often what religious people will say about their beliefs.

Any similarities in religions stems from humanities reverence of the sun. As we crawled out of the trees in Africa and spread north we had to have become aware of the suns cycle and this would have been the basis of most religions we know today. The sun dies at the winter solstice and is resurrected after 3 days.

Humanity would have gone through many thousands of years observing this phenomenon and so made up various stories to describe it in order to pass on the knowledge. Over time these stories became embellished and now we have the story of Jesus dying on a cross.

I reckon we have these feelings of peace because light levels induce it in us. I know that I am severely affected by different light levels and the sun is the almighty light any of us will ever know.

circular
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11 Sep 2012, 3:33 pm

Tensu wrote:

I wouldn't know. We are all clueless as to the internal experiences of others.

That we have different experiences doesn't mean that the texture of our mind is different.

techstepgenr8tion wrote:

I guess I have to ask you then; what makes you believe any of it enough to bother picking through the details?

What do you think I believe ?

I do not believe, I think that we have a mind of the same substance, if ever it can be called a substance, and that spirituality means something because there is something going on in people's head.

Tensu
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11 Sep 2012, 3:41 pm

circular wrote:

Tensu wrote:

I wouldn't know. We are all clueless as to the internal experiences of others.

That we have different experiences doesn't mean that the texture of our mind is different.

what dost thou mean by this?

techstepgenr8tion
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11 Sep 2012, 4:29 pm

circular wrote:

What do you think I believe ?

Don't know. I'd generally rather find out than put words in people's mouths.

circular wrote:

I do not believe, I think that we have a mind of the same substance, if ever it can be called a substance, and that spirituality means something because there is something going on in people's head.

I'm not exactly sure what you have in mind for that 'something going on' but if you're ever looking for more info to bolster whether you agree/disagree in NDE's touching base with something more than brain chemicals you have people like Bruce Greyson, Pim Van Lommel, Mario Beauregard, Sam Parnia, Penny Sartori, and Raymond Moody on the proponent side. Regarding your claim about pop culture pollution I'd heard that adressed by Raymond Moody (if I remember right) that studies of NDE aspect precentages before and after the pop-culture explosion slightly changed the number of people reporting the tunnel but every other aspect for the most part had the same reporting incidence (don't take my word for it though - see what you can find on your own).

As far as the proponents of such experiences strictly being CO2 poisoning or other claims Susan Blackmore was known as one of the bigger detractors albeit she's supposedly distanced herself a bit from the topic as of late. People claim V.S. Ramachandran offers good evidence of neurology being the whole 'thing' but I'd debate that by showing how neurology works in live experiences, hallucinations, phantom hands, etc. he's detailing the nervous system but that his conclusions don't really do one thing or another in terms of proving/disproving a nonlocal spirituality or non-local consciousness.

circular
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13 Sep 2012, 4:50 am

Tensu wrote:

circular wrote:

Tensu wrote:

I wouldn't know. We are all clueless as to the internal experiences of others.

That we have different experiences doesn't mean that the texture of our mind is different.

what dost thou mean by this?

Well your mind is also made of sensations, ideas, feelings, associations, etc. that are shapes that emerge and dissappear in the flow of your mind, right ?

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13 Sep 2012, 9:34 am

circular wrote:

Well your mind is also made of sensations, ideas, feelings, associations, etc. that are shapes that emerge and dissappear in the flow of your mind, right ?

Our understanding of what those words mean are all based on our own personal mental experiences. How I describe having an idea and how you describe it may be similar, but the actual experiences of idea-having that we have might be very different from another, seeing as the terms we use to describe them are so abstract.

Thus, two people of different faiths may both report an experience that they describe as spiritual, but that hardly means that they had they same experience.

ruveyn
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15 Sep 2012, 10:01 am

circular wrote:

Well your mind is also made of sensations, ideas, feelings, associations, etc. that are shapes that emerge and dissappear in the flow of your mind, right ?

Study scans of the skulls of living humans. X-rays, MRI, PET Scans, EEGs etc. You will not find the slightest trace of a "mind". All you will find is brains and they are made of protein, not sensations.

ruveyn

circular
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16 Sep 2012, 11:17 am

Tensu wrote:

Sure but then it is based on the same thing, the mind. So the shape may be different, but the substance is the same.

ruveyn wrote:

Yes of course, the transition between the protein view and the mind view is not well known for now. But the fact that it is not known does not allow to say anything about it and pretend it's the truth.

ruveyn
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16 Sep 2012, 11:46 am

circular wrote:

Let he who claims there is mind provide the evidence for his claim. So far, there is no objective evidence for the claim that something called the mind (separate from brain) exists. Ditto for souls. These are unproven assertions supported by no reproducible objective evidence. They have no more epistemological standing than ghost stories and fairy tales.

The burden of proof lies with the one who claims something exists.

ruveyn

techstepgenr8tion
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16 Sep 2012, 11:55 am

ruveyn wrote:

This is where cramming everything through the lens of scientific validation gets err....autistic. On that perspective art doesn't exist, poetry doesn't exist, there's no such thing as 'good' cooking.

We have an 'I' experience at a minimum that informs us we're having I experiences. That I experience generates thought, questions, etc., and its just as true whether that I experience is actually grappling with anything or whether everything it ever thinks, says, or does, is like playback from a DVD/Blu-Ray movie and essentially frozen without any semblance or free will.

In that sense, even from a materialist perspective, its not really an inane question to wonder how it all traces through - or at least there's a world filled with top level neuroscientists and researchers who don't share that outlook.

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16 Sep 2012, 12:57 pm

techstepgenr8tion wrote:

ruveyn wrote:

This is where cramming everything through the lens of scientific validation gets err....autistic. On that perspective art doesn't exist, poetry doesn't exist, there's no such thing as 'good' cooking.

Not so. One can determine if some one is painting, sculpting, composing music, playing music etc. These are observable activities and objectively so. What is subjective is the value or aesthetic status of the art being done or made. But the fact of art being done or made is as objective and real as a thunderstorm or an earthquake.

ruveyn

techstepgenr8tion
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16 Sep 2012, 1:06 pm

ruveyn wrote:

techstepgenr8tion wrote:

ruveyn wrote:

This is where cramming everything through the lens of scientific validation gets err....autistic. On that perspective art doesn't exist, poetry doesn't exist, there's no such thing as 'good' cooking.

Are you saying the subjective doesn't exist though? If so you can't ad hok 'all else' out there. If otherwise - perhaps its best to then look at 'mind' as a manifestation of the subjective.

ruveyn
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16 Sep 2012, 1:12 pm

techstepgenr8tion wrote:

Are you saying the subjective doesn't exist though? If so you can't ad hok 'all else' out there. If otherwise - perhaps its best to then look at 'mind' as a manifestation of the subjective.

Of course subjectivity exists. It exists along with sickness, evil, stupidity, laziness, incompetence and all the other things that hinder the life well lived.

The idea is to have as little subjectivity as is humanly possible.

ruveyn

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