God is not intelligent

That has all the hallmarks of a legit past life memory. Why deny it?

How did you know it was called a 'reed ship' were you already familiar with historical nautical terms/vessels, etc.?

 

Yes, I really do want there to be evidence.

This includes issues such as how the initial singularity happened, what is the root of quantum mechanics, and other questions for which we don't have answers.

Anyone can have their own speculative prism. We see that with religion, as there have been huge numbers of views of reality formed throughout human history.

 

What is a "hallmark of a legit past life memory?"

 

That is a non answer. I will interpret it to mean that you are unwilling to participate in a discussion about something over which we can only hypothesize, without the requisite information to test any speculations. I would note, that actual theoretical physicists, must all have a willingness to think about things, which cannot be readily proven or disproven. So you are showing that you do not have the mental constitution for what is considered more cerebral science. That's fine. The world needs applied scientists, too. But on a debate forum, specifically about religion & PHOLOSOPHY-- did you forget?-- you have no basis for criticizing other's sheer speculations, even if you decide, yourself, to sit out the conversation.

 

Just an expression, it felt real by his description.

 

Well, that post of mine really can't be interpreted as criticizing people's speculations, and I made the point about evidence too strong.

The extensions of current understanding made by theoretical physics are founded on what we know today, and include descriptions of how these ideas are theorized to work. That is, it is founded on evidence in that way.

That's quite different than postulating past lives, or claiming the increased knowledge gained by coming back from death, or claiming that consciousness can't be accomplished without the intervention of some great unknown that is constantly attending the function of each human brain on Earth.

 

And so you are contending that we have no evidence, of the existence of consciousness?

And this part of your post, shows all the faulty assumptions, which seem always attendant, in your thinking, which makes it so near impossible for you to consider new concepts. Did I say anything about past lives? Or about gaining knowledge, from a near death experience? Or claim that the force that I have stipulated as only influencing random chance, controls the functioning of every brain on Earth? Congratulations, you have successfully made your argument, against numerous other arguments. Unfortunately for your reply, not a single one of these, was MY argument.

I had earlier noticed the same, closed- minded, unimaginative, stereotypical thinking, from both you and Patricio Da Silva, whenever I used the word "God," or referenced any sort of Universal guiding principle. You both always assumed that, to be a being (probably in a long, white robe), similar to a human. This, despite my examples as far from that as, among others:

the group mind, of a bee hive;

the force that coordinates all the rapidly reproducing cells in a zygote & embryo;

the unifying dynamics between all the different organisms, which can unite, in biofilms;

the inherited knowledge upon which all ant societies-- which carry on many of the same activities, typically thought of as being indicative of human society, only-- operate;

the knowledge carried within any species' DNA, including our own.


This type of truly free thought, unencumbered with one's earlier assumptions, seems, as I said, beyond you.

 

I'm saying that we have no evidence that the consciousness that we have is provided by some supernatural force that is constantly providing aid to each human brain.

Yes, I went beyond the specific case you mentioned to cover a little wider range, since I'm more interested in the general rule of evaluating these things rather than arguing one specific type of claim at a time.

I don't see any justification for requiring supernatural intervention in the cases you propose and I'm concerned that your "free thought" direction is just the discarding of current knowledge. I do agree that one's own assumptions are a risky thing to bet on, especially if one isn't an expert in the field in question.

I think it is a cop out to claim such intervention with zero specificity. It's like saying, "Since I don't understand it, it must be God." This is like saying, "Since I don't understand it, there can't possibly be a natural explanation."

It's better to say, "Since I don't understand it, maybe there are those who have studied these phenomena or maybe I should become educated enough to join the exploration."

 

And you think, for some reason, that I am making this claim?

Would you be able to break your usual protocol of unsupported assertions, by actually showing where you might have got, such an erroneous idea?

These were analogs, given only as examples, of how things can be controlled-- orchestrated, if you will-- by a hand that is unseen, but which we know for a fact, exists! To bore myself by explaining this concept to you, I have lost count of how many times: 1) something must necessarily coordinate the creation of a human being, from a single cell. That cannot be based solely on local "decisions," made between cells. This is not speculation, but fact. And it is no ignorance, on my part, that leads me to state the fact that we do not know how this occurs. So you are suggesting what? That I should keep my mouth shut about this, even if I am only using it as an analog to help the imagination-challenged, to understand the kind of thing I am talking about, on a grander, universal scale-- within a religion and philosophy internet forum, no less-- until I figure out the answer that has long eluded science (about cell differentiation), myself?
Really, Will Readmore; not at all a reasonable perspective, you have; and not an appropriate one, for this forum. I will add, about this first example, that all our scientific ideas about how such a thing that we know occurs, might occur, is based on completely unproven, and unprovable, at present, speculations about it.

2) ants do not go to ant school; they do not serve apprenticeships; yet they know everything they need to know, to function productively in a complex society, with sometimes many different castes, and to react, just as they are intended to react, in colony emergencies. They raise crops, growing fungus, in the warm basements of their mounds, upon beds of mulched leaves; they keep aphid livestock, from which they gather its honeydew exudate, produced from stroking its backs; they CONSTRUCT complex tunnel systems, for their societies; they conduct warfare, against other ant societies, sometimes taking eggs, to be used to serve as their slaves; and they conduct very effective raids against other insect communities. By their numbers, by their mass weight, by their range, by the length of their time here, it is hard to say that humanity has had any more success, objectively, than they have. And this has all occurred by random chance, or by their following a design in the bulk of their actions, that is completely contained in their genes? Which seems more likely to you?

You know what? If you haven't gotten even a hint of what I mean, by this point, after all of my explanations, I am not going to go through the whole list for you, yet again, because it is clear that it would be no more effective than explaining this to a stone wall.

Like I said: if you don't like the conversation, don't participate. In remedial translation, for those who don't immediately recognize this: philosophy and religion forum = speculation allowed. So please try to deal with that in some more mature way, than to try to break up any discussion, that is of a speculative nature.

Thanks

 

I like the topic.

I just don't accept concepts like an "unseen hand" which we "know for a fact exists."

How could one discuss a topic where there is no evidence, yet there is an assumption of fact?

Is that really so unreasonable that you should want to ostracize me?

 

Asking you to allow the conversation to proceed, is now ostracizing you?

You are free to lodge your opinion. I think you have done that, in excess of a dozen times. As that opinion has never changed, any of those times you've stated it, I am suggesting that there is really no need for you to continue to chime in, at this point, merely to repeat an objection which is thoroughly familiar to any readers of this thread.

IOW, I don't think my saying that, if you can't come up with anything else to say, you should just give it a rest, is really "ostraciz(ing)" you.


The insults you have thrown at me, during this thread, on the other hand...

 

You said like it or leave it!! I think the meaning is universally known.

Then, you go on to explain why I should leave!!

I hope I haven't insulted you. I'll watch that.

 

IGnore my other reply, ('don't patronize me') it was meant for someone else.

 

No problem at all. I don't remember that as having happened!

 

If it's not falsifiable, then, logic presumes that 'we cannot know for a fact, exists'.
With this 'unseen hand' metaphor, You appear to be alluding to intelligent design, or something similar, which has yet to be proven. Right? Personally, I have my own philosophic musings about the nature of the universe which have stated in the OP but I do not make the epic mistake of claiming 'we know for a fact it is true'.

Your condescending attitude is noted. Look, condescension falls under a broader pseudo debate trick called 'posturing'. Posturing does not improve your argument. FYI, posturing (and all it's variants) is the province of novices or those who lack debate skills. Moreover, condescension is rude and immature, and here it is hypocritical given that you accuse another of being 'immature'

To wit:

Please abstain from condescension and hypocrisy in future rebuttals, thanks.

 

Yes, I asked the moderator to delete it, so apparently they got to it before you read it.

 

I agree. @DEFinning is making the colossal mistake of assuming his religious/spiritual philosophy is fact, and any speculation about the nature of the universe being caused by some supernatural force outside of nature falls in the realm of philosophy/religion. Now, it's okay to speculate with philosophical or religious musings, as long as we don't put them above their actual station, which is that they are just 'beliefs' and not 'facts'. I have my own philosophical musings, the ones I stated in the OP, but I would never claim 'we know for a fact it's true', that's nonsense.

 

You incessantly allude to some supernatural force being something in the neighborhood of 'intelligent design'. You allude to this via your anti-randomity stance. You are claiming something, whatever it might be, is 'directing'.

Now, the ID force to which you allude can be totally unlike a human in very way, but if it is ID, which presumes a consciousness of some level, in whatever way you are proposing, to that extent, it is, indeed, anthropomorphic.

Now, your assumption that I would be placing the description upon you of it being a dude with a beard and robe, that's entirely of your own musing.

You also posit that my view is not imaginative. In fact, my view, a belief, not a claim of fact, is entirely new, (or at least it's not conventional, the conventional being either pure atheism or theism) which is that the universe has spiritual basis, but that basis is non directional, non creational, it's not a creator, it's just creativity. I would suggest that I'm being far more imaginative than you are.

 

Nor did I. Plus, I generally can understand what I read. Look a little closer at my words, which you quoted:

DEFinning said: ↑
[...]

These were analogs, given only as examples, of how things can be controlled-- orchestrated, if you will-- by a hand that is unseen, but which we know for a fact, exists!

Naturally, you have deprived readers of the full context, but I was referring to my list of situations, in which, just as I said, we do know that these things are controlled, though we cannot detect the manner of this control. To anyone who understands English, again-- for those who are accustomed to having Rachel Maddow tell them the same thing, 3 or 4 times, and require this type of redundancy, to follow any explanation-- I am referring to my EXAMPLES, which I had listed, just meant to illustrate that my stipulated idea, would not be a completely new, never before seen concept, at play. That does not mean-- DUH-- that the words that I use to describe my examples, "which we know, for a fact, exist!" would also apply to the theoretical concept, that I am proposing!! (Double DUHH).

Since I see from my alerts, you have quoted me a couple of more times, maybe I can pull a copy of the list from one of those...

No, you never quote the list but, luckily, @WillReadmore , even though he is dead set against most of what I propose, at least has the integrity to fully quote, the ideas of mine, that he is going to address. So here is the list, to which the excerpt of mine, you took, referred:

the group mind, of a bee hive;

the force that coordinates all the rapidly reproducing cells in a zygote & embryo;

the unifying dynamics between all the different organisms, which can unite, in biofilms;

the inherited knowledge upon which all ant societies-- which carry on many of the same activities, typically thought of as being indicative of human society, only-- operate;

the knowledge carried within any species' DNA, including our own.
<End>

Do you contest the existence of any of those things? And can you point to a visible sign of that control, occurring? In most of those examples, we can, in fact, not even yet explain how the coordination occurs. So those were my illustrations, of a general idea. And this post, is an illustration, of what a waste of time it is, trying to have an intelligent conversation-- certainly about this subject, at the very least-- with you, Patricio.

FYI, don't anticipate more replies from me. I can't say for sure if I will even bother to read your other, I'm sure equally incisive replies.




In parting, here is what followed your inadequate snip, where I go into a deeper description, which you so admire in Rachel, but fault in me-- despite the fact that, as your post shows, you have not read enough, for your mind to have yet grasped the thing which you nevertheless throw your irrelevant monkey feces comments at, to show us all, just how bright, you really are.

DEFinning said: ↑
...
These were analogs, given only as examples, of how things can be controlled-- orchestrated, if you will-- by a hand that is unseen, but which we know for a fact, exists! To bore myself by explaining this concept to you, I have lost count of how many times:
1) something must necessarily coordinate the creation of a human being, from a single cell. That cannot be based solely on local "decisions," made between cells. This is not speculation, but fact. And it is no ignorance, on my part, that leads me to state the fact that we do not know how this occurs. So you are suggesting what? That I should keep my mouth shut about this, even if I am only using it as an analog to help the imagination-challenged, to understand the kind of thing I am talking about, on a grander, universal scale-- within a religion and philosophy internet forum, no less-- until I figure out the answer that has long eluded science (about cell differentiation), myself?
Really, Will Readmore; not at all a reasonable perspective, you have; and not an appropriate one, for this forum. I will add, about this first example, that all our scientific ideas about how such a thing that we know occurs, might occur, is based on completely unproven, and unprovable, at present, speculations about it.


2) ants do not go to ant school; they do not serve apprenticeships; yet they know everything they need to know, to function productively in a complex society, with sometimes many different castes, and to react, just as they are intended to react, in colony emergencies. They raise crops, growing fungus, in the warm basements of their mounds, upon beds of mulched leaves; they keep aphid livestock, from which they gather its honeydew exudate, produced from stroking its backs; they CONSTRUCT complex tunnel systems, for their societies; they conduct warfare, against other ant societies, sometimes taking eggs, to be used to serve as their slaves; and they conduct very effective raids against other insect communities. By their numbers, by their mass weight, by their range, by the length of their time here, it is hard to say that humanity has had any more success, objectively, than they have. And this has all occurred by random chance, or by their following a design in the bulk of their actions, that is completely contained in their genes? Which seems more likely to you?

 

Your assumption is that there is no God .. and that God defined as something with intelligence (regardless of whether or not you realize it or not) and so your assumption is false ..as something with intelligence exists .. aka The "I Am" ) thank you very much

 

This is hypocritically untrue, of you. You do assume that your "randomity" concept, is not only true, but is "self-evident." I, on the contrary, have stated no such thing, of any of my ideas; my foundational understanding is that there is no way that any of us, can know for certain "the Truth" underpinning our existence. I am merely trying to stroll down intriguing avenues of possibility.


To wit, if you are interested in considering any of the various differing manifestations of consciousness, which we do have scientific verification-- @WillReadmore -- exist, I am linking an interesting article on plant intelligence, in my next post.

 

No, that is nothing but your assumption. It is in keeping with my "posit" about your perspective:

Read on.


Another manifestation of consciousness, which we do not yet fully understand. Of course, it is less of a radical idea, to those of science, who are familiar with it, than to certain participants in this thread, that the basis of all things could be information. If that is so, any way of processing that information, I submit, deserves to be considered as "intelligence" and "consciousness."


https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/23/the-intelligent-plant

<Snip>
Others contend that “The Secret Life of Plants” led to “self-censorship” among researchers seeking to explore the “possible homologies between neurobiology and phytobiology”; that is, the possibility that plants are much more intelligent and much more like us than most people think—capable of cognition, communication, information processing, computation, learning, and memory.

The quotation about self-censorship appeared in a controversial 2006 article in Trends in Plant Science proposing a new field of inquiry that the authors, perhaps somewhat recklessly, elected to call “plant neurobiology.” The six authors—among them Eric D. Brenner, an American plant molecular biologist; Stefano Mancuso, an Italian plant physiologist; František Baluška, a Slovak cell biologist; and Elizabeth Van Volkenburgh, an American plant biologist—argued that the sophisticated behaviors observed in plants cannot at present be completely explained by familiar genetic and biochemical mechanisms. Plants are able to sense and optimally respond to so many environmental variables—light, water, gravity, temperature, soil structure, nutrients, toxins, microbes, herbivores, chemical signals from other plants—that there may exist some brainlike information-processing system to integrate the data and coördinate a plant’s behavioral response. The authors pointed out that electrical and chemical signalling systems have been identified in plants which are homologous to those found in the nervous systems of animals. They also noted that neurotransmitters such as serotonin, dopamine, and glutamate have been found in plants, though their role remains unclear.

Hence the need for plant neurobiology, a new field “aimed at understanding how plants perceive their circumstances and respond to environmental input in an integrated fashion.” The article argued that plants exhibit intelligence, defined by the authors as “an intrinsic ability to process information from both abiotic and biotic stimuli that allows optimal decisions about future activities in a given environment.” Shortly before the article’s publication, the Society for Plant Neurobiology held its first meeting, in Florence, in 2005. A new scientific journal, with the less tendentious title Plant Signaling & Behavior, appeared the following year.
<End>

How can anything that has intelligence, not be, de facto, a Being?

 

The observable universe is randomity, it results in ordered chaos in places, total chaos in other places. That is not a belief.

To say it's not random, that is a belief, that is 'creationism' more or less, or something similar.

Where my belief comes into play is that there is a spiritual underpinning to life, and I would never claim that as fact. That is a belief. But that belief does not conflict with randomity. If it did, I would abandon it because I'm not going to believe anything that conflicts with science.

Capiche?

But that it is randomity is fact, and self evident, and not subject to any belief, whatsoever.

That's not hypocrisy, that is science, it is NOT an 'assumption', it is a presumption of fact, and the sad truth is you can't make that discernment.

 

It most certainly is.
So thank you for proving your hypocrisy: only others, who assume their philosophy is fact, are making a colossal mistake-- but not you!!

So here we have myself, disproving your charge-- and not just for the first time-- that I am claiming anything to be fact. I am, in truth, not even lifting most of my ideas up to the level of "belief," but merely to suggested possibilities.

Patricio Da Silva said: ↑
I agree. @DEFinning is making the colossal mistake of assuming his religious/spiritual philosophy is fact, and any speculation about the nature of the universe being caused by some supernatural force outside of nature falls in the realm of philosophy/religion. Now, it's okay to speculate with philosophical or religious musings, as long as we don't put them above their actual station, which is that they are just 'beliefs' and not 'facts'. I have my own philosophical musings, the ones I stated in the OP, *but I would never claim 'we know for a fact it's true', that's nonsense.


Conversely, you are proving my own counter charge, of your hypocrisy, by calling your idea of "randomity," just as I had claimed, to be a fact. This is as patently false, as your pretense that "randomity," is even a real word, as opposed to something you'd made up.

Whose credibility, do you think is helped, by your reply? And whose is lessened (were that possible)?

 

It's not.

Is the sky blue?

See? Some things are beyond belief, and you'll just have to accept it.

If you can't see that randomity is the universe at large, I can't help you.

This conversation is over. I will not reply to any more of your epic failure to grasp the obvious.