I'm an atheist, and lover of science.. but I had to wonder, what if there is something beyond our p

Originally posted by RedParrotHead
reply to post by humphreysjim

 

Originally posted by humphreysjim
We can change a person by changing their brain

Sorry if off topic, but that's strikes me as pretty profound and I'll have to ponder this statement for a while. Implications being, if that's true (which I think it is) then would it be acceptable to "change" violent criminals without imprisoning them as a punishment? Assuming of course that we had proven technology to do so.

When it comes to the brain anything is possible. I have found the following book to be quite enlightening.
Sharon Begley - Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain
An interesting relationship between science and spirituality. The studies covered in this book really do shed some light on what brain is capable of doing and how well it can adapt.

This is what I was talking about in my signature thread. Allowing ourselves to see and consider possibilities beyond the box we have constructed for ourselves, without feeling threatened by those possibilities. S&F.

What if we are more than the sum of our parts? What if we are endless, boundless, energy? Then we go on after this husk dies. And who knows what adventures await us after we shed this body, and transform into that Butterfly.

I am an atheist/agnostic. But I personally believe we do go on after the body dies. Nevertheless, it doesn't scare me to consider that we may just simply cease to exist.

Kudos to you Miniatus for stretching your imagination, that's what it's there for.

Originally posted by humphreysjim
I think everyone can take comfort in the fact that the Universe is so vast and mysterious, that we will never figure it all out, and that death can never actually be proved to be the end - it just isn't possible, some will believe, and others will doubt, but we will always be clueless.

A wonderful response.. Death truly is the final mystery that might never be solved

reply to post by miniatus


I think as an atheist you thinking outside the norms the way you are IS beneficial.

Originally posted by miniatus

Lets look at personality or emotion... if you could change happy to sad... you're only changing the output.. If you could make a person go from polite to violent, you're still only changing the output .. ( the programmer in me is speaking now ) .. I am, in my proposition, talking about the input.. the brain merely processes and provides output

I'm a programmer too, and I think we can use a bit of software to argue the case quite well that the brain is not just the software, as you are essentially proposing.

If you have a bit of functioning software, the user can meaningfully use it, but if you were to tweak the software so that up is down and down is right, and buttons don't do what's expected, you just get a piece of unusable software.

Let's say the "controller" outside the brain is telling the brain to make the person happy, but it makes the person do something else entirely, you wouldn't have a person with a different personality, you'd have a completely dysfunctional crazy wreck of a person. So, you can explain cases of people going crazy and losing their minds and acting strangely, but you can't really explain sane personality changes like suddenly preferring music to sport.

You come across as being more agnostic in your thinking rather than an athiest (nothing wrong with that) just pointing it out... A true atheist totally rejects the supernatural in all its many guises.

Originally posted by LightAssassin

The consciousness, the 'soul', is not so much the driver of a vehicle as it is a hard drive storing information but not just the info you experience in your life but a drive that continues to operate after the CPU, Power supply and motherboard no longer exist, and is passed on to a new CPU and motherboard. Excuse the metaphors, please.

But then we have to still conclude that the brain is the controller? If so, wouldn't we be a completely different person if we moved the soul into a new body with a new brain/controller? It seems to me that to truly have immortality it is the controller that must continue to exist after the body dies, and that's what is hard to explain in the context of the brain so clearly dictating who we are.

Originally posted by miniatus

Originally posted by LesMisanthrope
reply to post by miniatus

 

People have been talking about the soul for thousands of years. It takes form as spirit, life-force, ego, consciousness, divine energy etc. The soul is an idea that is slowly dying as we learn more and more of the body. And any concept of soul is the product of thousands of years of Platonic and Aristotelean abstractions of things we understood little about—in this case, the human body.

Its obvious and evident that there is no soul. And as wicked and frightening as it sounds, it is closer to reality than any other lofty idea. It exists as an idea, nothing more.

As a science minded person even I cannot say it's obvious and evident.. the only thing we can say is that we don't know or that it's unlikely and without evidence.

It would be obvious and evident if we haven't been indoctrinated into the idea of a soul for thousands of years. Mix that with a general contempt for the human body (i've heard bag of bones and sack of meat already) and you have the perfect breeding ground for such abstract ideas. There is not a single shred of evidence to even hint at a soul, yet we force ourselves to believe the possibility is there. This mindset isn't scientific, but fearful of the end. Watch someone die, and see exactly what you expect to see—no bright lights, no fluttering soul, but a corpse.

Why cannot the hardware the brain and the software the CONSCIOUS interact wi fi style? This way the conscious CAN carnate within various flesh/light/plasma bodies w/o the human brain consider what the human brain was in the early steps of evolution it was not same size for sure nor able to function on the level the human brai functions on as of now. thhis to me personally shows signs of the brain function only being related to input wi fi data from the higher self. So the higher self conscious/spirit/internal energy mind IS the downloader wi fi to the 3d brain functioning in THIS REALM.

ALSO STILL NO EVIDENCE OF A METAPHYSICAL:

[color=cyan] What about this how come when a person dies, 21 grams is lifted from their weight? 21 grams still unexplained?

Originally posted by humphreysjim

Originally posted by miniatus

Lets look at personality or emotion... if you could change happy to sad... you're only changing the output.. If you could make a person go from polite to violent, you're still only changing the output .. ( the programmer in me is speaking now ) .. I am, in my proposition, talking about the input.. the brain merely processes and provides output

I'm a programmer too, and I think we can use a bit of software to argue the case quite well that the brain is not just the software, as you are essentially proposing.

If you have a bit of functioning software, the user can meaningfully use it, but if you were to tweak the software so that up is down and down is right, and buttons don't do what's expected, you just get a piece of unusable software.

Let's say the "controller" outside the brain is telling the brain to make the person happy, but it makes the person do something else entirely, you wouldn't have a person with a different personality, you'd have a completely dysfunctional crazy wreck of a person. So, you can explain cases of people going crazy and losing their minds and acting strangely, but you can't really explain sane personality changes like suddenly preferring music to sport.

Well that's not exactly true.. I've manipulated software merely to screw with my co-workers for fun before.. tampering with the code does not automatically make it unusable .. you can merely change functions so that they don't behave as expected..

Say I write software to control the volume of your machine.. but I randomly add or subtract the value by a few .. it's still usable but not behaving as expected..

Say I write software to eject the CD tray but rather than react the moment you click, I have it react 10 seconds later .. or 30 seconds.. you click 20 times but nothing happens.. then it suddenly ejects.. still usable, just not behaving as expected..

So I do entirely disagree.. toying with the mind alters the functionality of it despite the input.. it doesn't make it dysfunctional it just makes it not operate as expected..

reply to post by miniatus


While in the military, I was involved in an "accident".

Not wishing to bore everyone with details I will cut to the chase.

Four days after the "accident", I woke up in the hospital. A corpman told me I had died while on the table; then came back on my own. He said I had been out for a few minutes and ask if I had seen anything.

I tried to think back but all I could remember was a bright flash and the lights went out. This was the "accident".

I have never seen anything, before or after, which I would call abnormal. I have witnessed very little to make me really believe there is anything more or less than this world, here and now. I have realized since "my death" that I have even less fear of danger or death, but this is not much different than before.

I don't know of any way one could "test" for there being anything except here and now,. So I guess we really just have to wait and find out for ourselves.

Originally posted by LesMisanthrope

Originally posted by miniatus

Originally posted by LesMisanthrope
reply to post by miniatus

 

People have been talking about the soul for thousands of years. It takes form as spirit, life-force, ego, consciousness, divine energy etc. The soul is an idea that is slowly dying as we learn more and more of the body. And any concept of soul is the product of thousands of years of Platonic and Aristotelean abstractions of things we understood little about—in this case, the human body.

Its obvious and evident that there is no soul. And as wicked and frightening as it sounds, it is closer to reality than any other lofty idea. It exists as an idea, nothing more.

As a science minded person even I cannot say it's obvious and evident.. the only thing we can say is that we don't know or that it's unlikely and without evidence.

It would be obvious and evident if we haven't been indoctrinated into the idea of a soul for thousands of years. Mix that with a general contempt for the human body and you have the perfect breeding ground for such abstract ideas. There is not a single shred of evidence to even hint at a soul, yet we force ourselves to believe the possibility is there. This mindset isn't scientific, but fearful of the end. Watch someone die, and see exactly what you expect to see—no bright lights, no fluttering soul, but a corpse.

What cannot be proved or disproved is never obvious or evident.. to be evident requires evidence.. and there simply isn't any =)

Again, all we can say is we don't know.. death is the final answer to the question of death.. and I'm personally not prepared to conduct that test even if I were I wouldn't be able to submit the results to my peers for review..

Originally posted by miniatus

Well that's not exactly true.. I've manipulated software merely to screw with my co-workers for fun before.. tampering with the code does not automatically make it unusable .. you can merely change functions so that they don't behave as expected..

If you imagined that your software controlled a robot who had all the functions of a human. Once the user started doing things with your software that was suddenly not doing what was expected, it seems to me that robot would start to act in very strange ways, and you as the user would fiddle around trying to get it to do what you wanted to do, and the robot would appear to be acting crazy.

Break the input and you break the robot, really.

Let's say you have a guy called Dave, who loves football. He falls and hits his head, suffers a knock on the head, and suddenly he doesn't like football any more.

Does the *real* Dave (the soul/controller) like football or not?

Is it that he is telling the brain to go play football but the brain is doing something else entirely, like playing music? How can you have such a disconnect from what the soul really wants, to what the person is actually doing, and not have a completely dysfunctional person acting crazy? (I use the example of football to music because it is a real case I read about, it actually happened as described, and I think it's quite clear that the brain changed and the personality changed with it, because the brain was dictating the personality in the first place).

reply to post by humphreysjim


Precisely, and in my opinion that is the case, otherwise A LOT of people would be walking around telling of their previous life.

It is a separate hard drive with rules and tasks stored on it, and capable of storing infinite amounts of info....but what it really wants is for you to open up the PC, realise there is a second drive there, and then start attempting to access it. Then you understand what your true purpose is....what our true purpose as a whole is.

Once the drive is independent of the CPU, motherboard and PSU, it functions on its own and can see everything stored within itself....every experience, every affliction it has lived through over the aeons, and it will come back to that basic question.......Did I do the best I could have this time around with what I had and if so what's next for me? And this isn't you as a singular entity but a collective of everything your drive has lived through.

Originally posted by Ophiuchus 13
[color=cyan] What about this how come when a person dies, 21 grams is lifted from their weight? 21 grams still unexplained?

edit on 8/10/12 by Ophiuchus 13 because: (no reason given)

I'm familiar with the scientist who conducted those experiments

Actually for anyone interested in what Ophiuchus just said:

www.snopes.com...

It's all fully described here

Originally posted by LightAssassin

Precisely, and in my opinion that is the case, otherwise A LOT of people would be walking around telling of their previous life.

It is a separate hard drive with rules and tasks stored on it, and capable of storing infinite amounts of info....but what it really wants is for you to open up the PC, realise there is a second drive there, and then start attempting to access it. Then you understand what your true purpose is....what our true purpose as a whole is.

Once the drive is independent of the CPU, motherboard and PSU, it functions on its own and can see everything stored within itself....every experience, every affliction it has lived through over the aeons, and it will come back to that basic question.......Did I do the best I could have this time around with what I had and if so what's next for me? And this isn't you as a singular entity but a collective of everything your drive has lived through.

I see. I would agree that reincarnation makes more sense than a brain acting like an antennae for a soul.

7x3
777

Originally posted by humphreysjim
If you imagined that your software controlled a robot who had all the functions of a human. Once the user started doing things with your software that was suddenly not doing what was expected, it seems to me that robot would start to act in very strange ways, and you as the user would fiddle around trying to get it to do what you wanted to do, and the robot would appear to be acting crazy.

Break the input and you break the robot, really.

I still don't really agree.. altering the behavior of the robot would be quite simple without breaking it .. adjusting speed, adjusting how it interprets stimuli .. adjusting how it reacts to said stimuli .. none of that would break it, it's still simply changing the output .. you could ofcourse go nuts with those hacks, and even in toying with the brain that can happen.. you can give impulses that cause someone's arm to violently flail .. or legs fling.. eyes cross.. go blind.. those are extreme adjustments..

Originally posted by humphreysjim

Let's say you have a guy called Dave, who loves football. He falls and hits his head, suffers a knock on the head, and suddenly he doesn't like football any more.

Does the *real* Dave (the soul/controller) like football or not?

That is affecting the feedback.. Just with any interface you provide input and you get output.. if football was once pleasurable then the feedback would be pleasurable.. if the software malfunctions and suddenly football does not provide a pleasurable feedback, then the controller wouldn't like it either..

You know, people do "change" all of the time ... they mature and become more responsible, they fall in love and become nicer, they suffer a tragedy and become unpleasant or depressed ... and others say thing like "He/She is a different person, I don't know them anymore"

But they are still the same person, they're just acting differently. Not exactly sure where I'm going with this

Originally posted by humphreysjim

I see. I would agree that reincarnation makes more sense than a brain acting like an antennae for a soul.

The brain acting as an "antennae" could support the idea of reincarnation .. or to put it another way.. acquiring another rc car to control =)