Do spiritual things exist?
Okay, then let me try to give you an example of how the NMDA receptor actually affects your thought processes.
I take a substance called amantadine, and I take it four times a day. It does a number of things, including helping to treat my Tourettes. However, it is also a very weak NMDA receptor antagonist. It's much weaker than PCP. As you can imagine, I wouldn't ever want anything as strong as PCP. The amantadine actually affects the shape of my thought processes very directly, probably to a large degree through the NMDA receptor.
When I am not taking the amantadine, my conversation is weird for most people to follow. I will be talking normally for a little while about a subject, and that seems about right. However, imagine someone is talking to you, and that person is suddenly talking about something that seems to be entirely irrelevant. It would be easy to think that this person is crazy because he's just tittering on, just as happy as could be, just as if you are still following his train of thought, which you are not.
Well, instead of ignoring this person like your instincts might tell you, try asking, "how is this relevant to what you were just talking about?" That person would stop and explain to you a connection between one thing and the other, and the connection would make sense, after it had been explained. In fact, you might even see that it has some peculiar sort of value. However, you are struck with the unhappy realization that no normal person could keep up with this person's rapid-fire thought processes. No normal person could keep up with someone who has an epiphany on a level with a dimensional shift every thirty seconds.
At the chemical level, what my brain naturally does is put an extra coating of "velcro," which is dendritic spines, on the connective parts of my brain cells. It's really very simple, actually. Because of my natural brain chemistry, I am forming new connections between neurons at an elevated rate, and this is not always a good thing. I am a hyperactive puppy who goes chasing after will-o-the-wisps and rabbits while you are trying to hunt for some specific game, and it can make me frustrating to be around.
Now, if you want to tell me that my thoughts and decisions are governed by a vaguely defined "spiritual force" or whatever, rather than these electro-chemical processes, go right ahead. Try to make an argument that all of my thoughts, ideas and the choices I make come down to a "spiritual" element that science has not discovered.
Seriously, try to dismiss my belief if you dare. My belief is that every single neuron in my brain has a unique and peculiar history, and no other neuron could ever have the same history and unique character as any single neuron in my brain, and that is why I make decisions and have ideas in the way that I do. That is what gives me my personality. These are the moving parts of my soul.
I invite anyone to strike this idea down. I don't mind. I am not the kind of person who becomes wedded to ideas. I set a great deal of store by this one, but I see ideas as employees. They do a job. If they do not perform their job, they are assigned to another department, or they are occasionally fired on the spot. I don't care bupkis mit kuduchas about them besides that. I think it's crazy to get emotionally attached to an idea like you would a person or your pet dog. I have better things to do with my heart.
To my mind, I have made a pretty solid case that it's superfluous nonsense to try to tack an "immaterial, immortal soul" onto this picture. Sure, that's not "evidence of the nonexistence of something," but it is pretty vacuous to try to find a place in there for a "mystical force" of some kind. In fact, it's kind of dumb, and I think it's tacky.
I take a substance called amantadine, and I take it four times a day. It does a number of things, including helping to treat my Tourettes. However, it is also a very weak NMDA receptor antagonist. It's much weaker than PCP. As you can imagine, I wouldn't ever want anything as strong as PCP. The amantadine actually affects the shape of my thought processes very directly, probably to a large degree through the NMDA receptor.
When I am not taking the amantadine, my conversation is weird for most people to follow. I will be talking normally for a little while about a subject, and that seems about right. However, imagine someone is talking to you, and that person is suddenly talking about something that seems to be entirely irrelevant. It would be easy to think that this person is crazy because he's just tittering on, just as happy as could be, just as if you are still following his train of thought, which you are not.
Well, instead of ignoring this person like your instincts might tell you, try asking, "how is this relevant to what you were just talking about?" That person would stop and explain to you a connection between one thing and the other, and the connection would make sense, after it had been explained. In fact, you might even see that it has some peculiar sort of value. However, you are struck with the unhappy realization that no normal person could keep up with this person's rapid-fire thought processes. No normal person could keep up with someone who has an epiphany on a level with a dimensional shift every thirty seconds.
At the chemical level, what my brain naturally does is put an extra coating of "velcro," which is dendritic spines, on the connective parts of my brain cells. It's really very simple, actually. Because of my natural brain chemistry, I am forming new connections between neurons at an elevated rate, and this is not always a good thing. I am a hyperactive puppy who goes chasing after will-o-the-wisps and rabbits while you are trying to hunt for some specific game, and it can make me frustrating to be around.
Now, if you want to tell me that my thoughts and decisions are governed by a vaguely defined "spiritual force" or whatever, rather than these electro-chemical processes, go right ahead. Try to make an argument that all of my thoughts, ideas and the choices I make come down to a "spiritual" element that science has not discovered.
Seriously, try to dismiss my belief if you dare. My belief is that every single neuron in my brain has a unique and peculiar history, and no other neuron could ever have the same history and unique character as any single neuron in my brain, and that is why I make decisions and have ideas in the way that I do. That is what gives me my personality. These are the moving parts of my soul.
I invite anyone to strike this idea down. I don't mind. I am not the kind of person who becomes wedded to ideas. I set a great deal of store by this one, but I see ideas as employees. They do a job. If they do not perform their job, they are assigned to another department, or they are occasionally fired on the spot. I don't care bupkis mit kuduchas about them besides that. I think it's crazy to get emotionally attached to an idea like you would a person or your pet dog. I have better things to do with my heart.
To my mind, I have made a pretty solid case that it's superfluous nonsense to try to tack an "immaterial, immortal soul" onto this picture. Sure, that's not "evidence of the nonexistence of something," but it is pretty vacuous to try to find a place in there for a "mystical force" of some kind. In fact, it's kind of dumb, and I think it's tacky.
Your thoughts are most guided by potassium and sodium ions transporting through a semi-permeable membrane. Either that or you Speak in Tongues.
ruveyn
The thing is, he was making an argument based on his own ignorance. He believes that, just because he doesn't know how the mechanical aspects of brain functioning might precede thought, then it must be impossible for the mechanical aspects of brain functioning to precede thought, therefore God must give you a spirit thingy that makes all of your thoughts for you.
But the reality is that each individual neuron is not just some simple gadget, thoroughly uniform with any other. Every neuron in our brain has a sophisticated and complex history of its own. Not one is a carbon copy of the other. You can't even genetically program a neuron to take on a particular character.
Therefore, I am trying to illustrate how ret*d it is to say, "oh, ho-hum! The brain couldn't produce something as complex as human thought. God did it!" It sure as hell could.
I don't know your particular set of beliefs, though, so I surely didn't intend to cast judgment on them.
You'll have to define 'existing'. I think that maybe in the future some of what is considered metaphysical would have an explanation in physical terms, but then it would no longer be considered merely spiritual.
_________________
Double X and proud of it / male pronouns : he, him, his
I don't respect drug abusers who use their minds as playthings, and I don't respect religious people who use their minds as playthings. I guess that makes me a big, ol' stick-in-the-mud, I guess.
How about this. Brains exist and spirits don't.
ruveyn
Possibly because a question is being asked with no "position" even present?
My experience is that people who pose questions like this on message boards already know what they think, but for whatever reason are unwilling to state these beliefs in simple, declarative statements. If the author of the OP returns to this thread and says that I've completely misread him/her, and that they honestly have no idea one way or the other whether "spiritual things" exist, I will be more than happy to recant my response and will also apologize for misinterpreting the question the way I did.
The only precondition to me doing the above: I also still have no idea what the author of the OP thinks a "spiritual thing" is, so I'd like that issue cleared up before I doing any recanting or apologizing. Fair enough?
_________________
"The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken." ? Bertrand Russell
What I don't understand is that how can supposed spiritual system (as in entities) claimed to be unphysical and yet have any physical influence? That's a paradox because if it has any capacity to interact with our physical reality then it cannot be unphysical. Even if you claim all of reality as unphysical, reality still obeys a specific observable behaviour. That also means spiritual concepts should be testable by experimentation. Problem is, can a falsifiable statement be produced in terms of spiritual entities?
Another thing, wouldn't a spiritual entity if proven true imply a violation of the second law of thermodynamics? After all if a spiritual entity is eternal and indestructible, it's got to borrow energy from somewhere in order to interact with reality, while obeying the first law of thermodynamics at least. If it didn't obey the first law... That would result in an infinite amount of potential energy and these spirits would then be gods, unconstrained by any limitation.
_________________
"Have a nice apocalypse" - Southland Tales
Another thing, wouldn't a spiritual entity if proven true imply a violation of the second law of thermodynamics? After all if a spiritual entity is eternal and indestructible, it's got to borrow energy from somewhere in order to interact with reality, while obeying the first law of thermodynamics at least. If it didn't obey the first law... That would result in an infinite amount of potential energy and these spirits would then be gods, unconstrained by any limitation.
How can a particle become a wave or a wave become a particle just because someone observes it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave%E2%80 ... le_duality
Not that I pretend to even begin to understand that, either.
Another thing, wouldn't a spiritual entity if proven true imply a violation of the second law of thermodynamics? After all if a spiritual entity is eternal and indestructible, it's got to borrow energy from somewhere in order to interact with reality, while obeying the first law of thermodynamics at least. If it didn't obey the first law... That would result in an infinite amount of potential energy and these spirits would then be gods, unconstrained by any limitation.
How can a particle become a wave or a wave become a particle just because someone observes it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave%E2%80 ... le_duality
Not that I pretend to even begin to understand that, either.
Quantum Superposition. Basically a physical system will behave as if it's in all theoretically possible states until it's measured which then collapses to one definite state. That's as laymen as I can explain it. Even then I'm not sure if that's quite explaining it properly. Sounds bizarre, however that has been experimentally verified with the double slit experiment. I'm pretty sure it obeys the laws of thermodynamics too like everything else.
Spiritual entities on the other hand, have not being experimentally verified and if were possible, would require an extensive rewrite of physics to justify it.
_________________
"Have a nice apocalypse" - Southland Tales
I keep wishing the person who started this thread would come back and clarify a few things. For instance, what is meant by spirits as things? In what context does spirit enter into question? Is the thread about the spirit as consciousness? About a spirit that indwells each person, or about, as some of the responses have hinted, things like ghosts, or other incorporeal entities? (I don't personally think about ghosts, if such things exist, as spirits.)
Without a clearer question, I think we're all just talking in circles.
AngelRho
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Another thing, wouldn't a spiritual entity if proven true imply a violation of the second law of thermodynamics? After all if a spiritual entity is eternal and indestructible, it's got to borrow energy from somewhere in order to interact with reality, while obeying the first law of thermodynamics at least. If it didn't obey the first law... That would result in an infinite amount of potential energy and these spirits would then be gods, unconstrained by any limitation.
See bold. That's exactly it.
Although my own view differs somewhat. When you say "it's got to borrow energy from somewhere in order to interact with reality," this isn't necessarily true. We're trying to conceive of beings that are supernatural--existing apart from the physical world. It isn't necessary to assume that they obey physical laws at all. Interacting with the physical world, it isn't necessary that they expend any physical energy at all.
techstepgenr8tion
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Evidence seems to be mounting that yes, everything has a soul, yes - there is a 'core' soul (every religion has a different name for it), and in reality its the material world that's created by thought from the spirit or many spirits.
In that particular case its pretty close to being the complete inverse of reductive materialism where its the ghosts wielding the matter (and here not knowing it) rather than automations of matter bringing ghosts into existence as neurochemical or brainwave patterns in their own heads.
_________________
The loneliest part of life: it's not just that no one is on your cloud, few can even see your cloud.
I wrote you a pretty good introduction to gaining a more in-depth understanding of how the electro-chemical activity in the human CNS actually does the job of memory formation, decision-making, etc.. If the material was too advanced for you, I would be happy to try to dumb it down, but I think that I answered part of your argument rather well. Was I incorrect in assuming that you would understand what a plasma membrane is? Maybe it would help our discussion if you were to give me an idea as to what your knowledge base is in this subject.
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