[quote]dollarbill44 wrote:
Your whole theory is based on the premise that the only knowns are those knowns that are known. You are failing to account for the known unknowns, the unknown knowns and the unknown unknowns. Once those have been accounted for and accepted, I believe you will have your answer.
DB[/quote]
DB, I think you are leaving out one or two knowns and uknowns. 
[quote]Psycho Therapist wrote:
Death is the same thing as your existence before conception; a great big nothing. The world press photo contest of 2004 had a series of pictures of terminal patients living and moments after death. The difference is startling; once the breath of life has gone, what is left is matter, a big lump of decaying cells.
From my POV, thereās no life after death. You, the psychological entity thinking, exists solely due to the body, and once the body gives out, youāre back where you came from.[/quote]
I think our brains arenāt capable of fully accepting that. Have you ever seen a dog avoid looking into a mirror?
[quote]TriGWU wrote:
Could one argue that thoughts are just as existent but the means of communication are just messed up.
[/quote]
The thoughts have a changed quality. If a section of a personās brain were knocked out, and they became a much angrier person prone to violent outbursts, then it is extraordinarily unlikely that the mind is only āinterfacingā through the brain. If the mind were interfacing through the brain, and not dependent upon it (or emergent from it) for thought or consciousness, then the body would most likely fail to respond adequately to the commands of the mindā¦ not in an entirely different, very complex way. Picking a fight is a complex activity. To defend the hypothesis, weād have to argue that the separate mind could send all sorts of commands to the body, and that the brain would rearrange them in just the sequence necessary to speak and act in a belligerant fashion. But this is impossible, because we also can see this same body at rest, pursuing non-violent activities. An intelligent, separate mind would recognize that certain ācommandsā would result in violence with the newly damaged brain, but other commands would not. Rationally, it would learn to limit its commands to those unlikely to produce such results. If we are to argue that the brain-body is somehow overriding those commands, then weād have to ask what the possible purpose could be for two thinking organs (essentially) in the same body. So itās really a no-go, however you look at it.
[quote]This raises the question, is this an act of a non-physical presence (soul) or something that relies on the existence of physical life.
[/quote]
Imagination is certainly a mental activity. If you believe there is a soul, then it is possible that it doesnāt require physical life. My purpose here was to ease your fear about being stuck in a decaying body for eternity, sensing but unable to act. I cannot prove the existence or non-existence of a soul, unfortunately.
How so? Hereās the thing: What advantage would a non-physical soul (an insubstantial substance, which is meaningless) have over a physical one (a brain)? Why would brain cells not be able to handle the job? Also, properly speaking, it wouldnāt make much sense to conclude that we evolved a high level of thought process first, and then a soul afterwardā¦ if we were able to survive with intelligence, then weād have no need to evolve a separate soul.
Iāve read this several times and still donāt understand it. Could you restate?
Using your language, it is possible to not feel. Certainly, before we were born we did not āfeelā anything. We didnāt, again using your language, āfeel nothing.ā We simply did not feel at all, and further, there was no āweā to do the feeling. I get the impression that you are running up against that boundary of the ego that refuses to concede the possibility of non-being.
[quote]dollarbill44 wrote:
ā¦the unknown knownsā¦[/quote]
And which knowns would those be?
I agree with what you are saying in the parts that I did not include below. I just want to focus on these.
[quote]nephorm wrote:
TriGWU wrote:
There could have been the existence of an entirely physical body trapped by the mere level of thought capability that it was not able to physically overcome thought to complete tasks to survive.
Iāve read this several times and still donāt understand it. Could you restate?
[/quote]
I guess what I am trying to say isā¦
The possibility evolution eventually leading to a body whose thought evolved to be so complex that existence without a soul was a life so complex in thought process that life was hindered by our brain. This led to the evolution of those that had a 2nd aspect of vision/thought or the ability to comprehend with out action. The existence of a conscience and not just action.
My theory of action comes that we had action before inhibition. Inhibition was evolved after.
I donāt know that I will ever be eased at this security in death. I am not sure that it is an ego value that is denying my ability to accept the unknown. I think it is more a case of curiousity. I tend to dig/challenge people on values/thoughts/perspectives. I think this is just one of those things that has the most level of playing fields. Depending on how far you want to go with itā¦ it seems like the debate could go on / has gone on forever.
I also cannot concede to existence from nothing when in pure form we are the exact same but in different arrangement. The whole belief that the world is constant and that the world started and will end with the same amount of each element how can one say that we do not exist when the basic structures are all still on this planet?
[quote]DeepSouth wrote:
Flop Hat wrote:
And to answer the first question: If there is a spirit and a spirit world I donāt think it would be connected to our physical reality. Sights, sounds,smells, and touch would have no meaning in a place not governed by our physical laws. It would be a whole different existence.
Itās my ābeliefā that the physical world is a manifestation of the spritual worldā¦therefore; laws are the same, just in a different format, with the physical world being a representation of that formatā¦forced into existence.
[/quote]
You mean like the āMatrix?ā Iām not following.
[quote]Elkhntr1 wrote:
dollarbill44 wrote:
Your whole theory is based on the premise that the only knowns are those knowns that are known. You are failing to account for the known unknowns, the unknown knowns and the unknown unknowns. Once those have been accounted for and accepted, I believe you will have your answer.
DB
DB, I think you are leaving out one or two knowns and uknowns. [/quote]
I didnāt know:-|
[quote]pookie wrote:
dollarbill44 wrote:
ā¦the unknown knownsā¦
And which knowns would those be?[/quote]
That would be the things that we know, but we donāt know yet that we know them. Itās quite simple reallyā¦
DB
[quote]TriGWU wrote:
The possibility evolution eventually leading to a body whose thought evolved to be so complex that existence without a soul was a life so complex in thought process that life was hindered by our brain. This led to the evolution of those that had a 2nd aspect of vision/thought or the ability to comprehend with out action. The existence of a conscience and not just action.
My theory of action comes that we had action before inhibition. Inhibition was evolved after.
[/quote]
This seems to be more adequately explained by the evolution of the neo-cortex. At any rate, you are wondering if our thought processes are so monstrously complex that they require some non-physical mind to do the heavy lifting? And this heavy lifting is conscience, by your argument. So the argument would go: āWe need a way to inhibit our actions to improve survival. But it has to be at least somewhat rational; inhibiting desires and action willy-nilly will just make an ineffectual organism, not one that can adapt to complex environments. So, if the conscience (or inhibitory module, or superego, or whatever) must be rational, then we must have some way of
rationally developing inhibitions. That is, we must be sufficiently capable of generalizing experience, or predicting future outcomes, that we can discern consequences for our actions. We must also be able to learn from new experiences and inhibit ourselves to an appropriate level. This requires a new module to do all this work.ā
But I think youāll find, looking to ethology, that each skill builds on the last. A large mammal will need some ability to predict if he is to act at all. He must also have memory if heās to have the predictive ability. He must be able to remember that stabbing an animal kills it.
So our brains allow us to see further into the future, to plan, based on prior experience and imagination. While there seems to be evidence for an inhibitory center in the brain (that actually does the work of inhibiting), the ancillary functions all seem to be advanced forms of what we already must have hadā¦ not entirely new abilities.
Even so, letās look at it from another angle. Suppose that it is possible to have a physical brain that performs all of these functions, but the brain would not be fast enough. We therefore need a non-physical brain. Now, non-physical means non-physicalā¦ no mass. If you start talking about mass, then you have to have some organization for it to work, so this mind has to be entirely non-physical. Well, if the mind is non-physical, why do we even have a limit to our speed of thought? Certainly a non-physical substance would not be bound by physical speed limitations, right?
And if the mind is separate, why would a person wake up from being comatose for years, and not realize that so much time had passed? Wouldnāt a physically separate mind be completely conscious and active, even if the body were recovering from serious trauma? A non-physical mind is very, very problematicā¦ just based on our every day experiences. Unless, as I said, the mind were designed rather than being an accidental creationā¦ in the case of design, the rules would be completely unknown and unknowable.
I know this is not really relate to this thread but I would like to say that my grandma believe spirits truely exist. She claims to when she was about 18 years old, to see good or evil spirits manifesting into otherās people bodies(exorcism). They would even talk positively or negatively but never reveal where they were. She also asserts her father and mother witness this too. These spirits only appear to people who are not afraid of them? I really donāt believe in this because I havenāt seen this besides in movies. Does someone have any inside to this or exorcism? I know it doesnāt make sense but my grandma doesnāt lie or have seen any of these exorcism movies.
Nephorm:
You make sense to me still fun to throw it out there.
I would go that on the evolution of processible action, instinct was the first to exist. Now, I say this because instinct always has the priority action, but we learn that we are able to control the instinct to a certain extent.
It could eventually be possible that we could eventualy overcome instinct. This being the ability for people to place your hand on a hot object and not have it pull-off. Now this can both be tracked to physical thought process I suppose but this has to be some sort of evolution of inhibition. You look at most animals and in general they have very little inhibition capabilities. Wouldnāt the ability to contemplate effects of action be an evolution yet at one point we would just act on impulse.
This could also be seen in children who are very impulse driven and only think of action with the coming of age. Now coming of age comes with the development of the brain so that would support it being entirely physical.
Going into thought further. We seem to think in our fluent language. People born into bilingual society associate both languages equally where as someone who is learning a language tends to think in their native tounge and translate. People I have met who started early think / dream in both languages as if it is one language.
With that in mindā¦ is it possible for someone to think without language? Would this be further evidence of a entirely physical nature of the body?
I support the notion that the body is entirely physical I just find it hard to accept that there can be nothing without the awareness of nothing.
Is thought a by-product of language and communication? Would someone raised alone be incapable of thought seeing as they would not have a language to think in?
[quote]TriGWU wrote:
Is thought a by-product of language and communication? Would someone raised alone be incapable of thought seeing as they would not have a language to think in?
[/quote]
This is a very complex topic for which we do not have a complete answer. We do know that there is a language learning window. If one waits too long to learn language, it seems that the brain utilizes those capabilities towards some other end or ends, and that this is irreversable. Our data is, however, limited to only a couple of children who did happen to be raised by animals or isolated (tortured) by their parents. Since it would be unethical to attempt such an experiment, we may never know.
Whorf contends that language influences thoughtā¦ specifically that oneās mother tongue limits oneās abilities to think about certain things. One experiment showed that native Chinese, since they have no subjunctive, have difficulty with hypothetical problems, or processing hypothetical language (āIf it had not rained, I would have gone to the store,ā or āIf I were a fireman, the chicks would love meā). I have heard that this experiment was discredited, although Chinese acquaintances have confirmed that they have had conceptual difficulty with the subjunctive in english.
Anyway, not all people think auditorily as their primary modeā¦ it is possible to think visually and spatially. Feynman, for example, has said that most of his thought experiments were carried out visually and in his imagination, without need for words or math (at that point). Einstein (I donāt have the quote in front of me) said that math and language were only the second stage of his processā¦ the first part was entirely visual and intuitive, and language was merely the way he could convey those thoughts.
The fact that we have complex societies that change means that we must be able to think further in the future, I think. A child raised alone or by animals would have a rather static existence that changed in very limited ways over his lifetime. As such, he would be better served to requisition those parts of the brain for use in greater motor control and more highly developed senses.
So, to answer your question, I do think that language shapes the ways we think about things to a certain extent, but it is not so central to our intelligence as many suppose.
Given that the āequipmentā is the same, I find it difficult to believe that our experiences with respect to life and death are any different than any other animal.
For example, most of us are aware that dogs and cats have dreaming activity, just as we do.
Unless we are willing to open up spirituality and hence religion well beyond humanity, the shared biology and processes represent somewhat of a paradox to the accepted dogma.
[quote]vroom wrote:
For example, most of us are aware that dogs and cats have dreaming activity, just as we do.
[/quote]
If thereās a heaven, I have no problem with it being open to any kind of animal or plant life.
[quote]vroom wrote:
Unless we are willing to open up spirituality and hence religion well beyond humanity, the shared biology and processes represent somewhat of a paradox to the accepted dogma.[/quote]
Would you care to reword that, or maybe dumb it down a shade?
Iām just trying to say that thinking mankind is āspecialā when we are so similar to other animals in so many ways seems hard to justify.
[quote]vroom wrote:
Unless we are willing to open up spirituality and hence religion well beyond humanity, the shared biology and processes represent somewhat of a paradox to the accepted dogma.[/quote]
And, for the record, this is a very, very secular outlook on religion. God does not have to play by any human rulebook, so any similarities between our biologies have no relation whatsoever to whether or not a creator endowed us, as a special class, with a soul.
Werenāt there also examples of two people trapped alone together from development who developed their own form of communication. Iād be curious as to whether or not they thought in that developed language.
I understand your reference to Einstein and thought before language.
Crazy still seeing nothing vs not seeing.
In that senseā¦ does nothing exist?
[quote]TriGWU wrote:
Crazy still seeing nothing vs not seeing.
In that senseā¦ does nothing exist?[/quote]
You are thinking way too hard about this. There is such a state as āvacuum.ā That is, the absolute absence of matter. Anyway, when speaking of death, we arenāt speaking of ānothing,ā weāre talking about ānothingness;ā the complete absence of consciousness or awareness.
The root of the linguistic problem is that we are so accustomed to speaking and thinking of ourselves as experiential beings that we donāt readily speak of ourselves in terms of non-existence. A Buddhist would say that ego (self-awareness) is an illusion, btw.
On a semi-related note: anyone catch the finale of Six Feet Under tonight?