Do spiritual things exist?

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But philosophy does have its relevance in helping to ask the right questions and ponder on the implications of them. I wouldn't say philosophy fails at all but rather acts as a warm up step to considering a hypothesis to test if one wants to find a real answer.

Right, and without fresh hypothesis science is rutterless.

Whoooo...vedy sceddy!!

What constitutes vocalizations against the Ghost?

Does it have to be in Hebrew or is the Ghost multilingual?

Does the Ghost have good hearing or does one have to speak loudly in order to cause offense?

Very well said.

The philosophers ask mostly questions which cannot be answered.

If a query cannot be settled empirically it is either speculation or nonsense.

ruveyn

A full understanding of biophysics demands some level of sophistication in the subject we are discussing, though. If I were to try to go into any depth on it, I'd end up having to pull out a lot of my old textbooks to review a lot of old material. The gist of it is, there is a lot going on in the cell. You can either study it and try to deepen your comprehension of what is going on, or you could concentrate your resources on other subjects.

However, to me, it is kind of lame to just assert some thoroughly vacuous explanation, ex nihilo. If I think, "where are you getting that?" then I have sirens and klaxons sounding off. Eventually, I reach a point of frustration at which I have to say, "I don't think we can have a valid discussion on this, so just keep believing what you believe. It's your business, not mine." I feel like I'm leading a horse to water and then arguing with him over whether he's feeling thirsty. You will change your beliefs when and if you make up your own mind to do so. At the end of the day, you are the king of your conscience, and all I can really do about it is whine and petition.

Okay, now the question is, what causes you to make the decisions that only you, uniquely, would make? What causes you to have the thoughts that are, in fact, uniquely yours to have? And what I have studied has led me to believe that the unique history and background of each individual neuron in your brain, each of which are as different from each other as people, is ultimately what leads to everything falling into place in a certain way, at a certain time.

I was lucky not to end up institutionalized with my background. I was, as far as the household was concerned, the psychotic, autistic freak who mutilated walls and counters with knives, broke things, stole things, lied constantly, probably did drugs, slept in weird positions, and listened to weird music. And stank. An admission that I was skeptical of the literal interpretation of the sanitized version of the Ark and Flood story confirmed that I was possessed by demons.

When it looked like my father was going to try to have me charged as a felon for the disappearance of some silver or something and he had called in the police chief twice to search my dwelling (an ancient and rotting makeshift shack with electricity and a wall to piss on) for things that had gone missing from places in town, I finally grew enough balls to stop covering up for my younger brother's drug habit, which just got me thrown off the premises altogether. I didn't really expect to be believed, but I gained a tad of self-respect from the exercise anyway. Besides, they were better off without a scapegoat to excuse their ongoing failure to fix their own problems.

Since then, I've been in two extremely good relationships, in which I have been respected and valued, and I've been slowly getting better at learning to treat others with the same respect and kindness that I have received for the past few wonderful years.

Well, I was kind of hoping that I could help you see the scientific perspective on human cognition as at least an interesting avenue of investigation. I always bristle somewhat when someone says blithely, "oh, science can't explain human thought, and we really don't know," when this very young science has really contributed some eye-opening and fascinating perspectives on how the human mind actually does its thing.

What is getting more deeply entrenched in my views all the time is that the human soul isn't just some random conflageration of cells shooting off electrochemical signals, but it is a history. It is a novel of a person's life. It is a culture. It is a civilization of cells. It is more sophisticated than anything we could have ever imagined it to be. It is simply self-evident to me that you and I are two civilizations, with their own culture and religion, sending coded letters to each other across thousands of light-years of space. I am confident that, if you could see it the way I can see it, you would understand why I find it so exciting.

Last edited by WilliamWDelaney on 10 Jun 2012, 6:10 pm, edited 3 times in total.

Empiricism itself is a product of philosophy.

No. It is justified by philosophy perhaps, but it was arrived at by practical means. Cut and try. Philosophy justified the empirical method after the empirical method proved very successful.

ruveyn

There was no understanding of any sort of empiricism as distinct from intuition etc before Aristotle. The empirical method was never distinct before it was made so by philosophy. The formal structure of the scientific method, too, was a product of philosophy, along with scientific epistomology. This continues right into the modern era - for example, the concept of falsifiability was established by Karl Popper. No philosophy means no science.

...

Oh...actually, it's hard really to define whether Codex Theodosianus is even, strictly speaking, entirely "religious." It reads something like an amazingly sophisticated instruction manual for the aspiring tyrant. It sets in place a very thorough system of law, but any modern person would sooner be dead, dead, dead than ever live under it. I'm not entirely sure, though. I haven't really deciphered much of it, and I may eat those words. I've learned better than to trust someone else's summary of something that I can very well learn to read for myself. If you think that journalists are the world's only spin-doctors, think again.

Well, I'm familiar enough with all of these ideas. I simply find a lot of them to be vacuous. For example, you say that you believe our cosmos to be one of many: although I am doubtful anyone will ever really know the real extent of the Cosmos, it seems a bit daft to first vacuously suppose something to be there and then proceed to making all kinds of empty-headed suppositions about its nature. This is what frustrates me often in these kinds of discussions. Ultimately, I realized that I was really the only one taking them seriously.

Also, I will have you know that I was always very much a believer in the idea that spiritual meditation could heal the human body, but I realized that I had no idea as to why or how. That was very much the size of it. It was something that, for all practical purposes, seemed to be very effective, but I realized it would be vacuous to suppose about its workings. Well, I somehow ended up doing a lot of investigation on cytokines and immunological questions, while studying the workings and interactions of endogenous opioids, and I realized that highly trained and educated scientists and doctors have been making a fairly unsupported set of assumptions for centuries, which is that the various organ systems in our bodies are largely independent of each other. It turns out that they are wired together a lot more closely than we thought several decades ago.

Meditation based on "mindfulness" is actually gaining a lot of esteem, and the reason it works is that it helps control certain inflammatory responses. However, I even found a paper published in 2009 that studied "compassion" meditation, showing an effect on plasma IL-6 levels. Now, if a doctor had told me 15 years ago that he was going to be treating a carcinoma by giving "kindness lessons," it would have sounded a little hokey and Return of the Jedi-ish. However, I think that evidence is mounting that the mind is a part of the body, not just in the body.

To me, this strongly supports my worldview, which is that the mind is just the output of an organ system. It seems strange to me that some people try to interpret it the other way, trying to say that this somehow negates the idea that the mind is part of a bodily function, and they get pretty enthusiastic with their proclamations. They're like, "Oh, see? The soul is much more important than the body, all of them were created by God, and God sits on a blue throne guarded by four-headed monsters! Praise the lord!" It's really right the other way. What we are really proving, when we find how closely tied-together mind and body actually are, is that they are thoroughly inseparable from each other. One is the device, and the other is the interface.

I'll look at the rest of your material later, though. I just wanted to get in my thoughts on this first bit. I really have to take some time to review your supporting material. Thanks for humoring me.

Last edited by WilliamWDelaney on 11 Jun 2012, 8:54 am, edited 1 time in total.

Aristotle emphasized observation but he didn't emphasize doing experiments to test predictions. As far as doing experiments are concerned, that came long before it was formally part of a scientific method. As the Archimedes palimpsest will testify, Archimedes came up with the correct law of buoyancy because he did experiments to confirm predictions but that was long before it was emphasized as part of the scientific method in late medieval to early modern Europe. It became part of the scientific method because it was noticed that it worked well in practice.

I think that once you follow up on what I said after that a few things would clear up. Specifically especially the first thing I quoted and bolded above. The authentication there essentially starts with corroboration of the stories, verifications on whether what they saw when they supposedly left their body were true or false, whether these things were even knowable from where they specifically were spatially (ie. to rule out them overhearing things), and if all of that can be confirmed, it tends to lend credibility that a lot of what they're seeing tells us 'something' valuable or valid about the broader world for a lack of a better term beyond our material universe that we know of.

From that standpoint its not an exercise of imagining things out of whole cloth that don't exist and then trying to define them, rather its essentially a nonempirical activity strictly because the accounts are subjective and sensory rather than being gauged by scientific equipment. In recent decades they've really done as much as they can with a subjective/sensory experience to try and perform at least basic verifications on the validity of these experiences; the reason they still get talked about or that there are still medical researchers very interested is because they're finding things that they simply shouldn't if the mechanism were strictly materialistic.

To me, spirit is anything that relates to consciousness. Even if its strictly related to matter, its still a very bizarre property that makes subjective perception possible.

The whole notion of "physical" breaks down at the sub atomic level. Everything we see around us (the so-called physical world) is mostly empty space. And the tiny bit that isn't said to be empty space is what we call charged particles that appear to either 1)come in and out of existence at random, or 2)occupy more than one location at a time.

So the physical world is made of nothing but random illusory bits of stuff that don't make sense.

It makes me believe the universe is false and we are brainwashed by electromagnetic energy.

I have no idea what "spiritual" is, but I very much doubt the materialists view is correct when it comes to the big picture (whatever that is).

Aristotle's Organon guided experimentation of the era and deals with far more than just observation, even if it does come short of the Baconian method. Mathematics, if you'll recall, wasn't considered a science at this time - it was a philosophy. And the two are still intertwined; think of Bertrand Russell or Rudolf Carnap.

The modern scientific method of course is a direct product of philosophy. So are logics, including deduction. All these things were formalized by philosophy. I am sure astronomer-priests and simple farmers were doing empirical experiments well into prehistory, but they never had a formal understanding of empiricism, formal logic, deduction, or any of that. It was all developed by philosophy, which was the thing that cleaved science and logic from religion and superstition.

Yes, I tend to think of the psyche as being the manifestation of spirit.