What's your religion?

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^techstepgenr8tion- all very good points. Have you read William James' Varieties of Religious Experience? I read sections before but am just now reading the whole thing. His rationale for focussing on what he calls "personal religion", as opposed to " institutional religion" in the first lecture brings up interesting points on what you discuss.

I haven't either but I'd agree that I see it referenced all of the time.

What I do find interesting is that there was a kind of neutral monism that William James, Bertrand Russell, and Ernst Mach were all looking at which somehow fell out of favor and is starting to get another examination (I remember Michael Silberstein in his lectures leading up to 'Beyond the Dynamical Universe' indicates that this his preferred read on the data over panpsychism and strong emergence). One of the things that I've read but haven't quite felt like I understood was James's excerpts on 'The Tigers of India' and imagining one vs seeing one. I think by the time I've finished George Hansen's book mentioned above (I'm about 10% in - really good so far) I might be able to see maybe how something like neutral / dual-action monism might connect, or not, with what James is saying in those excerpts.

The one thing I tried kicking around with some other people at a particular philosophy forum and I think we sorted this out, if a person can potentially have premonitions of events further out than just a few days, this really suggests something like Minkowski eternal block universe over at least a strict read of Everett many worlds hypothesis. It could possibly be that you could have a version of Everett that's also a Minkowski eternal block, not mutually exclusive perhaps, but a pure Everett would only allow for very short term premonitions. At least for those who've really had some strong stuff happen in this regard (ie. statistically) and it's gone out months or years not a day or two, that at least suggests Minkowski eternal block as a base structure, which also plays into Silberstein's ideas of consciousness as adynamic global constraints. Admittedly I haven't read Silberstein, McDevitt, and Stuckey's book yet but I'm thinking I'll need to add it to my near-term reading list.

^techstepgenr8tion you are obviously way ahead of me on philosophy. I find it fascinating but it also makes my head spin! I have trouble keeping track of all of the terminology. I will look into some of the authors you mention though. Thanks.

For reasons of my own healing, my interest in religion or philosophy recently has very much centred on the self.
I'm not sure about premonitions. I've not had a convincing one and I'm very aware of the fallibility memory and how we re-write to memory every time we rethink something. I'm willing to consider the idea certainly but I'm very cautious.
I have had a "telepathic" communication of emotional material that was quite convincing, but I'm also the only observer and so am careful how seriously I take it.

I'm not a philosopher or read that widely in philosophy but what you are talking about appears to be something called precognition.

Believe it or not its actually being taken seriously by science
https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog ... ecognition

Our brains are wired for precognition because we need to draw on environmental cues to predict what will happen for our survival, finding food or looking for a mate. Some people are much better at drawing conclusions from the environment based on triangulating cues to predict the future.

^we are indeed very much predictive engines. I believe our meaning making (and thus spiritual and religious ideas) is an evolutionary outgrowth of our predictive abilities.

I think, at least for stuff like western esotericism (which I've spent time with) the most reliable use of it is giving your subconscious mind more tools to work with.

The catch 22 as I've found it - give yourself more tools and have more of a distance between stimulus and response, which gives you better choices and more potential for success but makes people like you less because you're socially conforming even less by creating that gap. The choice for me was still easy, ie. if I'm not going to be treated well anyway by the world I might as well give myself the benefits and the worst that happens is the outside world goes from being able to actively abuse you to just having to ignore / unperson you in a more passive-defensive manner.

I think I'm indeed talking about something else (significantly longer range and without environmental queues to draw on).

An example:

Having a dream of rare intensity where I'm sitting in a classroom with others but hear a loud, disembodied, not so much voice but a vocal sound that I've never heard before, and it's a jarring and vivid enough dream that I take note of it.

Six months later there's a new employee who I'm training and maybe a month or two into our working together she's making that exact sound to get people's attention.

I do remember telling people about that dream well before the actual 'real world' instantiation landing, remembered exactly where I was while ruminating on its content several times during that week. I pin the dream down to June of 2014, instantiation started in November of 2014.

People indeed would say 'Oh yeah, people make vocal noises all the time!', I had something similar when I was talking to a friend about a night of intense focus on a problem, with psychedelics, and for the first time in my life waking up - bolt upright - looking at the clock, seeing it was 3:33 AM, and going immediately back to sleep and her response was 'Oh yeah, people wake up out of sleep all the time'. There are probably all kinds of people who'd tell me I'm explicitly not paying attention to the 99.999999% of my life where synchronicities 'aren't' happening. I had a full week or two back in summer of 2013 that were incredibly steeped in both synchronicity and paranormal-like experience, that's too long a story but I only want to bring it up to say that this stuff's smacked me over the head enough that I'm kinda forced to take the occurrence of such things at face value even if I don't have the same level of trust for taking the content literally (outside temporal matches sure but - it tends to be a bit aimless as I'll describe later).

These (premonitions and synchronicities) have a particular sort of character, they tend to be brought about by very intense emotional states, intense internal conflict, or in the case of dreams - stuff that both lands in your top 5% in terms of intensity and have really distorted / jarring elements. Stuff like this really expands the numerator for me but it also suggests that whatever it is isn't going on at a cognitive level, or at least any degree of contact that your mind actually has with it is deeply subconscious.

My take though - even if there's a suggestion here that consciousness is deeper than neurons (to which - I'm really big on views like Donald Hoffman purveys in terms of the ontological situation of consciousness) - my life experience and even tangential experience of what I've described above doesn't lead me to wonderfully warm, fuzzy, new age fluff-bunny stuff. By observation I see the world as a profoundly Darwinian, Machiavellian sort of place and it's red in tooth and nail - ie. the Red Queen's kingdom where everyone has to run twice as fast to stay in the same place. It's actually disturbing that these experiences would be almost solipsistic in terms of the levels of importance (aside from maybe the few times - like the story above - when it foreshadowed people I'd be in contact with, but even there it seemed to just indicate a proximity I had to them via unusual lines of causation), it's made me feel like on one hand consciousnesses is fundamental to the universe but at the same time said universe is either in something like an instinctual dreaming state or possibly insane by our standards. The flavor of these things seems to match 'deep' subconscious patterns in terms of the bizarre logic, similarly with hypnogogia you can feel like you're seeing some sort of occult glyph that explains everything perfectly to your satisfaction (until you wake up enough to realize it made no sense at all), but that's about the closest match that I can find in terms of where these things come from.

Christian. I don't subscribe to a particular denomination, but Baptist, Pentacostal, Lutheran and Eastern Orthodox are some of my favorites.

Christian - non-denominational

I was in Japan on business many years ago and talking with a gal when I asked her if she was religious. She responded that she had felt bad at different times in her life before, but never bad enough to consider religion.

For me that was an interesting response as I had never considered the subject of religion for its therapeutic properties. I had always been interested if something could be true or not. This opened my eyes to the possibility that most people in the world use religion for how it makes them feel.

None for me.
So I suppose atheist/agnostic.

I must say that I'm a bit surprised of the results so far.
I would have thought about 50/50 between non believers and Christians.
And a few more votes for other beliefs.
But not that many have voted, so...

/Mats

Around here, most of the Christians think that most of the other Christian denominations go to Hell, even on recent schisms in tiny sects. So, it is kind of hard to know what "Christian" means.

Yes and no.
It's an interesting development, earlier on it might had been possible to have the choise Abrahamic, lumping together Christians with Jewish and Islamic.
However, nobody in that group would not agree that their belief was an Abrahamic one, they wouldn't pick say Pagan.
And the same goes for Christian as of now, yes we have protestants, catholics, and various sub groups of the two, and possibly completely other denominations (I'm far from an expert), but I'm pretty sure they'd call themselves Christians, perhaps with a prefix added to it.

/Mats

The country I live in and the culture I grew up with surrounded with has Roman Catholics as majority.

Which just doesn't resonate with me just as do NTs' societies in general don't resonate with me.


I'm not an atheist, that's for sure.
I'm not particularly religious either.

In fact there's just no need for me to believe or disbelieve.
If anything, it's irrelevant whether I do or not -- didn't mattered to me if it happened to.
I don't even care whether there's a proof (of existence and non existence) or not.