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Politics : Should God be replaced? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (7353)	4/23/2001 4:25:39 PM
From: Solon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 28931

Yes, I am precisely saying that my interior perception is of a spiritual being, with qualities of self- awareness and self- determination. Material mechanisms can yield neither Why is it necessary to adulterate (or if you prefer--augment) consciousness with spirituality? Do you believe that spirit is a type of consciousness? You remark above indicates to me that you believe that a spiritual being exixts NOW as you, and is, in fact, the defining nexus of your existence. It also indicates that you believe that you (the inner spiritual you) are non material--without matter. Yet you still claim to have existence and being, by which one can infer that you have boundaries (unless you consider yourself omnipresent); However, the idea that you might consider yourself omnipresent gainsays your usage of pronouns which indicate that you do consider YOUR self to be distinguisable from OTHER. For anything to have boundaries and spatial limits, and to be distinguisable--it must be composed of something--it must partake of something; it must have attributes, and attributes require substance. Whatever your consciousness is, you know very well that it does not influence events when the physical brain dies, so there is no reason to consider that it is influencing events, apart fron the brain, while the brain is living. Furthermore, your identification of consciousness (vis-a-vis your ideas of determinism, free will, etc.) as composing a spiritual Self leads to the idea that all creatures who exhibit behaviour are spiritual beings. They exhibit apparent will just the same as you do. Actually, if I was to consider any supernatural field for existence, I too would consider it to be inclusive of all matter and all beings--but that is another story. A quick look at the rest of your post convinces me that you have not refuted my points; indeed, that you have generally walked around them, or simpy re-asserted this or that. Here is a link to 722 online papers on consciousness from every angle imaginable. They point out the plethora of disagreement and uncertainty which plagues the field. I have only read a couple of dozen of them over the last few months; I have not yet come across any that are making a connection between consciousness and spiritualism. So if you would like to give the proof behind the assertions, it would be grand. Further, and perhaps better, if you care to read these 722 articles and provide a synopsis for the thread, I am sure you will find a surfeit of gratitude. u.arizona.edu

To: Neocon who wrote (7353)	4/24/2001 12:39:43 AM
From: TigerPaw	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 28931

Matter cannot be self- aware for the simple reason ... (followed by complex sentence) Self awareness appears to be a rather simple process. I'll be the first to admit that it has not been yet duplicated in the laboratory but it's just a matter of time, a short time. Simple brains work by pattern matching using a scheme very similar to : robotic.dlr.de The adapative feedback network. The complex brain of "higher" animals, in particular mamals has an additional trait. The whole brain is duplicated (at birth) except one of the halves pattern recognizes memories instead of the current senses, the combined output of current sense and memory sense operates the decision. Human brains contain a third section, the frontal lobe which recognizes patterns in memory as they relate to patterns in the current senses. The result (quite by accident I'm sure) is self awareness along with the adaptive flexibility to modify past behavior based on memory. (I hope you realize that I have simplified the process almost to a Republican level for you) The result of the human tri-brain arrangement is that it is making decisions based half or more on it's own internal sense, and not the senses that are presented to the eyes, ears, nose, and other immediate sense organs. It is really a sign that you are human that you can believe entirely ridiculous things. Pretty much only humans (and some apes) are able to reject what their own senses are showing them and base a decision on what their internal memories say. You see, the human memories (via the frontal cortex) are fed back as if they were current activities. Unfortunately for you, this arrangement allows for a looping structure to be encoded such that all paths lead back to central axiom. In your case it is a diety (Others develop a different fixation such as Einstein's unproductive search for the graviton concept or particle). It happens to almost everyone after a while because once the idea-loop is formulated, the pattern matching will tend to converge on this now favored axiom. (You could escape the trap, but it would mean modifying your customs and after a while there are probably not enough unprogrammed neural pathways to accomplish a "paradigm shift"). the "scientific" point of view will not tolerate the assertion that we are spiritual beings, The ability of the human mind to create new worlds in thought, and sometimes in matter, is intensly spiritual. This is the reward system of the feedback training loop that makes our mind work. It's just that nailing the spiritual down to a prosaic unchanging axiom removes the actual adaptive feature of the human brain, creativity, and replaces it with ever more intricate pattern matching around the preferred axiom. When all thoughts lead to the diety, creativity is limited. TP