Do you guys believe in god?

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^I meant the same thing with what i wrote. Depending on God helped me survive in this world

I believe in God.

I have had too many direct experiences to not believe in God.

Never had those experiences.

Obviously, God hasn’t “chosen” me.

^ You May have experienced extraordinary things but attributed it to other factors/forces.

To me simply having a job and having a non abusive family are signs that God is looking out for me.

I’m glad you feel that way, and won’t argue with you.

I just haven’t had that experience. But it’s not my place, certainly, to dispute others’ experience.

I wish a god would look out for the children who have been and are currently being harmed. Or better yet, I wish he’d keep them from being harmed or abused in the first place, but he doesn’t.

God shouldn’t pick favorites, not when there are innocent people suffering.

I would prefer to move away from a philosophical discussion as consciousness is a purely psychological construct of a phenomena that is based on physics. Bishops are not going to give you the answers you need.



I'll have to deconstruct this and respond in due course

So with your absolute certainty, and whatever you mean by 'based on physics', what exactly are we doing here with our discussion?


Lol, cute. I'm not invoking ecclesiastic authority. Your description of idealism is the old fashion Bishop Berkeley version which is almost a straw man these days. It's a description of what you're calling idealism and I was trying to establish that what I'm interested in and what's coming back for more consideration is something else.

Last edited by techstepgenr8tion on 17 Jul 2022, 7:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Having had my share of odd experiences it's not 'God', it's just something other than absolute reductive materialism / naive realism which these days sounds almost as perverted.

Consciousness if it exists outside of the body moves away from a psychological phenomena to become something governed by the laws of physics

It might interest to know that the study of the mind was the domain of philosophy of religion until philosophers in the 18th century became bogged down in the concept of the tabula rasa - which translated into latin was the conundrum of whether (as some christians believed) we are born with innate knowledge from god (this is in the era before genetics was understood). As scientists discovered genes and that mind and body are connected (not dogmatically separated as declared by Descartes) and finally how knowledge and perception of the world is scaffolded from the environment that the entire concept moved away from philosophy and into the realm of psychology.

Invoking philosophers to explain consciousness is like invoking magicians to explain physics. Philosophy provides a framework to approach the concept of knowledge but doesn't explain how we acquire knowledge. Explaining consciousness through religion, theology and philosophy is simply projecting "ideas" with no basis in science.

So in my own examination of the topic - one of the more challenging things I've run into, particularly with my own psychedelic experiences, is running into the sense most mental phenomena do trace their impulses down into embodiment concerns. It seems like a large part of what's going on within us at subconscious levels has to do with concerns of survival and gene propagation. It's not the only thing I've come to experience but I'm saying that I've seen just how much of mentality is geared toward survival. There's a lot as well that seems to come in the way of instinct for people and it can be tough to tell which specific things are genetic or epigenetic and which things are that interacting with subtle environmental queues. I like the way Bret Weinstein phrased it often that we aren't a blank slate, we're the blankest slate in nature and that's allowed us to outsource a lot to culture and it's made us more adaptive.

There's that basket of goods and there's another basket of goods as well. There are occasional, rather strong, patterns of synchronicity that happen in life. I really don't want to get too deep into them here but there are a lot of profound human experiences that seem to break the bonds with mental check-in with genes and go into much more unusual territory, their intensity is one thing but the more important piece is the degree to which they seem to carry information about the future or over distance in ways that doesn't get along with strict physicalism well. When I try to really apply rational analysis to the shape of these things a couple things come to the surface: 1) for any kind of premonition to have durability it would strongly suggest that we're in a Minkowski eternal block universe and 2) I really think most synchronicity would suggest orchestration between different levels of conscious processes in the world we live in, ie. higher-level aggregates of mental processes and story telling, not just between our genes and our brains but minds made of groups of people and even nations as well. The behavior of that last bit would be functionalism with multiple realizability on different scales.


I'm not sure whether I'm throwing name-salad out there (people you've one-and-all never heard of) and it's assumed that these are all people that just stair at the ceiling and dream these things up or whether you know of all of these people and have some particular bone to pick with their methodologies? Lets try sorting that one out first (and to this I have to assume we're not still going 'round-and-round' about some confusion over my having mentioned Bishop Berkeley but that you're aiming it at the rest of the people I mentioned).

@techstepgenr8tion
This is much more interesting to me, Yes you mentioned name dropping famous philosophers (your name salad) but your own personal psychadelic experiences are empirically more reliable (in terms of self-observation). I've had similar paranormal experiences which I understand to be outside the domain of psychology but I know I personally experienced it.

On the matter of survival/dispersing genes, yes, we are genetically programmed to be motivated to survive and pass our genes. Freud makes that clear in his own observations that much of what motivates us to behave is governed by primal urges. He claims these are unconscious drivers.

There's interesting theories how ideas can become a contagion whereby mass hysteria allows for internalisation of concepts/beliefs in a matter of a relatively short span of time. Social media has accelerated this phenomena when we talk of somethign going "viral". A type of synchronicity.

There is also the concept of information resonating at a higher level where (something like the cloud) information can be accessed and downloaded (Nikola Tesla famously claimed all of his innovations were download from some type of universal library of information uploaded by aliens). The biologist Rupert Sheldrake put forward a theory called Morphic resonance "the idea of mysterious telepathy-type interconnections between organisms and of collective memories within species" and accounts for phantom limbs, how dogs know when their owners are coming home, and how people know when someone is staring at them."

The only one of them who was relatively arm-chair was Kastrup and with him I'm not even 100% - he was a computer sciences guy as CERN, I'm just not as certain whether he does any kind of formal experimentation rather than just the sort of thing I do. Hoffman does a lot more formal experimentation and actually got to his current worldview via experimentation on evolution of visual systems (he's in the cognitive sciences department at UC Irvine). Michael Levin is straight-away applied biology not philosopher, Karl Friston is a neuroscientist. I'm clarifying that what I've experienced has been further clarified, vetted, extended by a lot of these people and I'd offer that they're names worth having at least a high quality thumbnail on even if you don't have time to read books or watch three hour discussions.