Do spiritual things exist?

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No, you didn't. You proceeded to lecture me on 8th grade A&P. Well, I GUESS it's 8th grade these days...advanced biology when I was in high school, but covered the same material.

In principle, you're saying that ions are received into a cell to pass on communication among cells. But WHERE do they come from? Simple answer: the preceding cell in the chain. You left out the causative factors in releasing ions. Now, those could be a lot of different things. It could be something in the physical environment. There are also reflexes, which are responses that bypass consciousness entirely.

Original thought requires that the mind be in control over the various ways it manifests itself. I don't feel compelled to write this--I have a few minutes, I find contemplating, exploring, and developing my ideas satisfying, and I overall enjoy self-expression. There really isn't anything pragmatic about doing this. I could just as easily decide NOT as I have to do it. I am in charge of the actions I commit as well as the content of those actions. So maybe some calcium and sodium ions got exchanged in the process. But, so what? Who or what initiated those exchanges? Well, um..."I" did.


I have no idea, either. But I'll let you in on a little of my background: I experienced a few years of an abusive co-dependent relationship. What motivated me to get out of that relationship was primarily I got sick and tired of being "wrong" all the time. I mean, ALL THE TIME. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, and I often didn't even get ONE. I concluded that it was OK to be mistaken and that I could accept myself for who I am, warts and all. But I would never, EVER accept that I am NEVER right about ANYTHING. I went through a tough period in which being ignored or someone assuming I was wrong from the outset was really hard for me to deal with, so for the most part if I ever got anything positive done, I had to work alone. I often still feel that way. But the difference between me now and me then is I've also accepted that what matters most is a synergetic attitude towards others. I've learned that getting attention or credit for my role in a project is not the point, but rather the project itself. I'm satisfied if I've served as an initiator or if I've had some positive influence over the results. I come up with the ideas, hand it off to people to do the work, and let myself be satisfied with the results, whether for better or for worse. If mistakes are made or failures occur, I'm ok with that--I've learned something and I'm better for the experience. Even if I'm an example of what NOT to do, I still feel that I've made a contribution.

Just from what we've discussed in the past, it seems we have a lot in common. You can't be wrong. About anything, and that stems from some relevant events in your life. I feel the same compulsion, but at the same time I also am aware that my actions can either build me up or tear me down. I make my case, support my opinions, and then I let it go. I've accepted that there are some facts that some people will never accept, and I don't expend a lot of energy making enemies. If someone feels so strongly that they've won an argument, I resist the urge to keep going.

And no, I'm not consistent about it, but it really just comes down to how interested or entertained I am with something. I've done topics to death and will probably eventually do the same thing again one day. But I've also often found my behavior, even if my behavior is justified, to ultimately be self-destructive. And that's not what I really want to do. The kinds of topics that really get me going are extremely rare as of late--but don't worry. "I'll be back."

Most importantly, I don't let myself become a slave to other people's ideas, and I don't allow myself to be a slave to my own compulsions to be right about everything. I have nothing to compensate for, so why bother working so hard to prove myself? The less I say, the more I can DO.

Mental processes come from neurons.

ruveyn

Hope it isn't a trip if I'm replying in reverse order, just think it'll work out better logistically:

I don't know if I've done quite as much 'deep' reading - ie. I read Dalai Lama 'The Art of Happiness' around 20, picked up the Nag Hammadi and read a bit of that, read No One Sees God by Michael Novak several years later and read a Habermaas vs. Ratzinger book but not a whole lot else of strictly religious nature.


To try and give the storyboard of what's being implied by all the NDE'rs being interviewed:
1) We're eternal
2) We're here because the grass really is 'greener' - ie. supposedly living in the spirit world you're ability to grow, evolve, etc. can't be what it is when you have a physical form or fixed locality. Essentially that's the explanation of the world we have - that we'll be self-actualizing and continuing to do so as a race practically forever (quite optimistic vs. those of the standpoint that we'll asphyxiate or blow ourselves up).
3) The other thing generally happening is that once a person's vital signs are really shutting down and permanent death in most naturalistic senses seems about 99% certain rather than experience the actual moment the soul pops out of the body (out of body experience), after a while uncannily realizing that they're looking down at themselves and doctors or whoever else it seems like people do one of a couple things - a) go toward a tunnel that appears or b) consciously experience superposition. All kinds of other things happen - life review (with which all judgment is self-judgment), and past that people really don't have the strongest grip in the sense that a quick tour and 'you need to go back' or 'you can go back' means that a lot of people don't get to see the totality of it.
4) Lives are given as learning experiences.
5) In terms of structure our universe, as vast as we believe it to be, is just one small side-attraction in the bigger web of universes which is truly googleplex gargantuan - people say that a lot.
6) The notion is imparted that all the abilities that we have for telepathy, self-healing, etc. on the other side we also all have here but haven't figured out how to use it. Its being offered as well by a lot of people who can grasp visions of the future that we'll have a mass transition away from modern technology in the near future because we'll supposedly get our heads around wave function collapse, plant telepathy, etc. and we'll be able to control everything with our minds to the point that most of what we need to do these days will become superfluous.

What lead me in such a gnarly direction?

Before getting into what I'd call the strong anecdote (eyebrow-raisers for a jury) I'll talk about a few more unrelated pieces. This theory staples together a lot of what I considered floating absurdities or things that I couldn't take down or make sense of as a materialist. These include:

1) The random coin toss generators that were being operated to electronically flip a coin 100,000 times per second. These were outfited something like a seismograph to see if any variations across a weighted average would have statistical outlying significance. They're findings were that it would derandomize - sharply - when major (typically bad) world events were occuring along with a early jump during what they believed to be a period where people were having premonitions.

2) PEAR (Princeton). They found that people were able to have minute effects on random systems by will, however they found that the more ambitiously a person toils with trying to rig the numbers in their minds they go from doing well at it to worse. They also mentioned that couples - in love - do better that most other people. Strange...

3) Cleve Baxter - spent thirty or forty years researching 'primary perception' which is linked to the two above. Apparently he was the world's formost polygraph expert, decided to hook up a polygraph to a plant when he was watering it to see what would happen and got really strange results. His research essentially includes polygraphing plants, bacteria cultures, cell cultures from people, and the research suggests that he can eat yogurt across the room and the plant empaths the bacteria getting killed. He can have a device set to drop brine shimp in boiling water three rooms away from a plant that's hooked up to the polygraph, drive across town to get away from the office, come back and check the equipment - brine shrimp were dropped at 48 minutes, the plant three rooms away had a wild series of polygraph spikes.

4) While people talk about faith healing and psychic ability all the time and the concepts not really being foreign to us - at least as a materialist - I had to accept that even if it made no sense, was too sloppy or ragtag to be a conspiracy, and there were all kinds of people vouching for this stuff or showing xrays of cancer essentially disappearing in one place or a psychic working with police to solve a crime somewhere else - nothing about this whole side of things smelled right. It seems like when you just have one or two aggitations or things that don't sit neatly with the worldview you've drawn they're annoyances but not telling enough to really give you a direction on how to compensate them out.

5) The double slit experiment - just in that it dictates that wave function collapse is an observer related function. I don't know that I'd run out and call this proof of dualism, but it does at a minimum show that the tail wags the dog - ie. that there's something about 'us' that does something to physical reality. What some physicists have been suggesting is that since consciousness causes wave function collapse that it wouldn't make sense for the mind itself to be made up entirely of collapsed waves itself to have this effect.


Those five things seemed scattered, seemed odd, but with this particular theory - the one repeated over and over again from near-death experiencers, its like puzzle kind of falls together and the paradoxes and enigmas disappear.

Another thing - I didn't have an 'experience' that I knew of, however in researching this stuff I did find in one of the interviews that the records of his life were stored on something that looked like a mandala. I had no idea what a mandala was, looked it up and nearly sh** myself. Reason being - I had a night out with friends back in 2010 where we were downtown, things were epically out of sync all around, when I got home I did my usual social hypernanalysis (complements of dealing with PDD) when I was laying in bed, really thinking deeply of the high philosophy of human interaction, how to view myself, all the details, and my fear was letting any clue, any small but salient detail escape me. From out of nowhere I started seeing the lines drawn in all the details, my deterministic path, but, the most mest up thing about that: I zoomed out to see that all of my life experiences were stored on something that looked like a glowing neon disk with a diamond/plaid pattern of rainbow colored tials lit up like an 80's dancefloor. At the time I thought "Wow, the subconscious is a hell of a thing" as I was atheist at the time but reading a lot on Jung and getting a similar sense from other people that the 'us' below the surface is much bigger than the conscious us, but hearing about mandalas in people's NDE's really caught me off guard. Its also one of those things that I had no point of reference to even conceptualize at the time.


Oh, no, I meant that strictly in the sense that medical technology is amplifying the number of incidents. Its not proof, really its more just reconciliation of why we're seeing it much more now than we used to.


Shortest and highest level view first:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_qBIw7qyHU

Some strong speeches and interviews from a conference at the end of April:
http://www.btci.org/bioethics/2012/videos2012/vid1.html
http://www.btci.org/bioethics/2012/videos2012/vid4.html
http://www.btci.org/bioethics/2012/videos2012/vid3.html

Interview with Mellen Thomas Benedict:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... 8105593532

(plenty more of these out there but I think you'll get the gist)

Also, if you want any book recommendations for more detail:
http://www.amazon.com/Irreducible-Mind- ... 0742547922
http://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Bey ... 289&sr=8-1


My sense of this stuff right now - its incredibly early, for everyone looking at this stuff, and I wouldn't rule out that it may have plenty of room to take incredibly odd twists and turns, but at the same time I would say that if any of it at all is true it clarifies that we're at a minimum not dealing with a universe that works on reductionist materialism at least as we have it formulated today.

How can you guys waste so much time on questions that cannot be settled empirically?

ruveyn

Empirical is a slice, not the whole pie.

Lack of empirical content is sure proof of nonsense when talking about the actual honest to goodness real world.

ruveyn

They do to a spiritual person

Well, I'd just argue that there are other types of evidence one can have a preponderance of. If its one or two isolated and disconnected things, okay, there could be an error there. When its several and they're happening often - at a minimum its time to at least start formulating questions to see if a more inclusive theory can be found.

Then why all the adjectives?! Life in the raw does not need any.

trying to make sense of that statment.

At one time Socrates spoke of light as particles. There was at that time no empirical evidence of that. Now there is. Was Socrates' lack of empirical evidence "sure proof of nonsense" in that case?

Lol, speaking in riddles again and I didn't even know it.

Okay:

Not all evidence can be crushed up and put in a beaker and reacted with chemicals, nor will weighing it on a gram scale necessarily be helpful. Case in point court trials - putting the defendant in a beaker and reacting him with silver nitrate won't tell you anything, maybe reacting him or her with 6 molar hydrochloric acid might get them talking a lot but that's a different thing altogether.


Talking about the quantity of different 'anomalies' to one's worldview. There's a certain threshold where a person has to question what they believe when exceptions to the rule start adding up.


ie. "The more I find out about what's going on around me the more I'm realizing that my current worldview doesn't work - time to find one that fits better".

Did I make that any clearer or no?

I think he's trying to say that a big explanation-of-everything sized hypothesis is too big of a bite to chew. IMHO with the things we're discussing though I don't think that will be permanent, its just awkward at this point; give it another twenty or thirty years and we'll be in a different situation.

When taking that standpoint appropriately rather than dogmatically I think it means 'proceed with caution and verify', if its taken dogmatically, unfortunately, it seems to mean think inside the box.

Socrates had no empirical basis so he was spouting nonsense (as philosophers are wont to do). When Einstein did the same thing he had evidence. He even got a Nobel Prize for his work on the photo electric effect. We know that Socrates accidentally said a true thing because 2200 years later someone provided the facts. Unsupported speculation is hot air. Evidence supported hypothesis is science.

And that is why philosophy fails (most of the time) and science succeeds (most of the time).

ruveyn

The good news - unlike in Socratic times I don't think an Einstein will take 2200 years. Additionally if a person makes a Socratic decision on that level (ie. makes a strong hypothesis prior to empirical verification) - whether or not to trust in your own judgment and act on that estimate has a lot to do with what can be gained or what kinds of problems can be avoided. On the mundane level we make choices every single day that we don't know what the conscious outcome of would be. To say that we need to see someone else of a given authority make all of our possible choices and we'd make a verdict based on that conference afterward and only ever in such a circumstance - we'd be utterly paralyzed.

I was mistaken, I believe it was Aristotle, and that he theorized about light waves, not particles.

However my point is that in every age mankind believes it's so enlightened that nothing new can be learned to disturb the current world view. But time and again we're proven wrong. What seems like nonsense today, may tomorrow be fact. It may of course continue to be folly, but we don't and can't know that now. We can surmise, we can make educated guesses, and yet who would have guessed a few years ago that cannabis, based on new knowledge of their DNA, would be found to be closely related to the strawberry? A few decades ago we knew a lot about DNA, but not that.

So, can the existence of spirits as things be proven? I have yet to understand exactly what the OP means by spirits. But I think anyone with any knowledge of past scientific discoveries that were surprises to the scientists would have to answer that they don't know. No other opinion makes scientific sense, and is in fact based on belief, not on science.