Materialism is just illogical because of convenient presuppositions

a reply to: Dark Ghost

The word fairy, Santa Clause, and consciousness connote ideas, the trappings of the imagination, not things, not stuff, so we should quit talking about them as if they were.

a reply to: LesMisanthrope

How do you define "things" or "stuff"? What property/characteristic must something have to be given those labels in your opinion?

originally posted by: Unresponsible
Man I love your threads. Now that's out of the way, and prefacing by saying that I agree with your point, the next question becomes "what is spirit".

I do feel some sympathy for materialist thinkers, seeing as science isn't quite at the point of understanding the actual nature of consciousness yet and the only other way to come to grips with the essence of the human condition is via mystical/religious practice, which materialists tend to have it in for right off the bat!
So it's a limbo between not enough information/information perceived to be tainted, I'd imagine that many just throw their arms in the air and assume nonexistence of spirit as a matter of recourse.

My personal view, for what it's worth is that spirit and soul both transcend the pop-culture "little ghost in your head that drives you and goes to heaven when you die" metaphor (although this is a fine shorthand explanation) and seeps deeply into a pattern of existence that is largely undiscovered and unimagined. We see glimpses of this in the traditions of various religious and mystery schools, but even those are painted heavily in the archetypes and artistic temperament of the experiencers.

All of humanity is on equal footing with regard to The Other; perhaps science will finally make a paradigm shift that will begin to understand this part of life; holographic theories and simulated reality theories are certainly implying headway into this direction. How this will shape daily life and the perception of the "normal" in the future is a fun but frustrating exercise in imagination.

Thanks for your reply.

I think a lot of this goes back to dualism and René Descartes. The separation of spirit and the material vs. Alchemy which didn't separate the two. I agree with Alchemy and nondualism.

Alchemy basically said you can turn base materials like lead into more noble ones like gold but this was just the outward meaning of Alchemy. It was about the transformation of the soul as well and you can be transformed from a base human to a god among men.

I think materialist just said they don't need the spirit or the soul just the material. This was also due to the abuses of the Catholic Church when it comes to scientific thought.

I do think Descartes was right though when he talked about an immaterial non local aspect of mind.

During the Modern era, philosophers such as Descartes and Locke developed the notions of material substance and immaterial substance. Material substance, or matter, was primarily defined as being extended and spatially located. Descartes, and other thinkers, also took the view that material substance could not think. Immaterial substance was taken to lack extension and to not possess a spatial location. Most importantly, immaterial substance was regarded as having thought as its defining attribute. While these philosophers are long dead, the influence of their concepts lives on in philosophy and science.

aphilosopher.wordpress.com...



When you look at the quantum level, it's non local and there's no space or time. This is why you have things like retrocausality when looking at entanglement in time. Something that happens that we perceive as coming first can actually happen second on a quantum level. So it goes to what Einstein said. The distinctions between past, present and future are just a persistent illusion.

With this being the case and because local realism is dead, on a fundamental level of reality, consciousness can occur before the big bang and there's no this happened first or this happened second. We only separate these things in our classical perception of what we perceive as "reality."

So in my estimation, Alchemy is correct in the sense of nondualism. To me, spirit and the material are like Yin and Yang with spirit being dominate because of thought.



This gets even deeper when you look at what's going on today from people like Susskind and Maldacena. The universe is starting to look like a construct of quantum information on a 2D boundary. So the universe is a quantum computer.

On the boundary, there's entanglement and this entanglement is quantum error correcting codes! When you want to protect say 1 logical qubit you have to encode it and spread it out amongst 9 entangled physical qubits. This protects quantum information from noise and decoherence.

What's truly amazing is that these quantum error correcting codes are on the 2D boundary and these codes have an equivelency to the geometry of spacetime! So what we call 3D spacetime is just a projection of 2D quantum error correcting codes. Here's 2 good talks by John Preskill.

Is Spacetime a quantum error correcting code?



Holographic Quantum Codes



It goes even deeper when you look at theories of Quantum Consciousness by Penrose, Hameroff, Fisher and others which connects consciousness to quantum information. 3D spacetime could be the projection of entanglement(quantum error correcting codes) and consciousness could be the projection of the quantum information that's encoded on entanglement.

WOW!

a reply to: neoholographic


Due to the effect of electron spin upon space-time their are two different ways information about life forms are recorded.

With respect to space-time.

a reply to: neoholographic

I wonder if our philosophies concerning the nature of existence are the same as our hypothetical creators; is it a function of the universe as we understand it (pixels on a 2D screen) or are these problems that they (He?) also speculates on in the hyperreality.

Perhaps we really are here to express the mind of God.
Or are we ants in an ant farm who imagine that God is also a much bigger ant in a much bigger ant farm; there's no reason to assume one way or another that I can tell.