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ORIGINAL: lickenforyou

There is no concrete evidence that consciousness exists without brain activity. That is a true statement. However, on these boards, one is guilty of being dogmatic simply by believing it to be true. 

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DomKen
Consciousness is the result of physical processes of the human brain. Until you can show that there is more to it, and you can't, the rest is woo.

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ORIGINAL: tweakabelle

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DomKen
Consciousness is the result of physical processes of the human brain. Until you can show that there is more to it, and you can't, the rest is woo.

I see a world of difference between your claim and the claim made by DomKen. It's elementary to see where the dogmatism is coming from. And sad to see the bankrupt, narrow-minded materialism driving it.

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ORIGINAL: Kirata

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ORIGINAL: DomKen

Try again then. Present your data, not anecdotes and not studies designed so poorly that I can come up with a better protocol in five minutes.

Or at least that you think you can, eh? And, of course, one need only add that there is no such thing when it comes to findings that contradict your faith. With all due respect, Ken, I've come to regard you as the closest thing to Jerry Falwell that I would ever have imagined it possible to run into outside of a "Praise Jesus!" breakfast. The only thing you two differ on is doctrine.

Now that's not to say that I can't appreciate your interest. It's important to draw heresy out into the open, where it can be crushed with suitable vigor and showmanship for the education of the heathen. But only a fool would credit your pretence of an open mind. So cultivate patience, good priest. I'm sure that the topic will come up again sooner or later in one thread or another.

Or if not that topic exactly, then some other outrageous heresy worthy of scourging.

K.

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ORIGINAL: DomKen

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ORIGINAL: tweakabelle

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DomKen
Consciousness is the result of physical processes of the human brain. Until you can show that there is more to it, and you can't, the rest is woo.

I see a world of difference between your claim and the claim made by DomKen. It's elementary to see where the dogmatism is coming from. And sad to see the bankrupt, narrow-minded materialism driving it.

So you demand that I believe something you can present no evidence for.

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ORIGINAL: lickenforyou
There is no concrete evidence that consciousness exists without brain activity. That is a true statement.

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ORIGINAL: eihwaz
No one here is insisting that science "account for the supernatural" as you ascribed many posts ago.  Rather science ought not preclude questions, notions or phenomena currently thought "supernatural" a priori; doing so is based on prejudice, not logic or data.   As I said before, sometimes what's deemed "supernatural" is discovered to be natural -- and susceptible to scientific inquiry -- after all.  It's one thing to say that certain questions aren't currently within the purview of science; it's another to claim that they will forever be so.  Yet that's what your claim does.

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This is bullshit and not well thought out bullshit at that.

If you can present data that can be independently verified and repeated then scientists will listen to you. However by definition the supernatural is none of that. If you're claiming you can actually measure a ghost or count the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin how do you propose a skeptical scientist repeat your experiments to verify your data? When scientists go looking for ghosts, for instance, they never ever find anything. The true believers claim such nonsense as the skeptical mindset drives them away.

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ORIGINAL: mnottertail

The mountain gorilla was first discovered by a German officer, named Captain Robert von Beringe in 1902.
 
Zo!  Ich kann nicht verstehen was Ich kann nicht gedanken.

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ORIGINAL: juliaoceania

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This is bullshit and not well thought out bullshit at that.

If you can present data that can be independently verified and repeated then scientists will listen to you. However by definition the supernatural is none of that. If you're claiming you can actually measure a ghost or count the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin how do you propose a skeptical scientist repeat your experiments to verify your data? When scientists go looking for ghosts, for instance, they never ever find anything. The true believers claim such nonsense as the skeptical mindset drives them away.

That is the entire point, there are some things that cannot be measured yet, just because we cannot measure them does not mean they do not exist. I am not talking about the existence or nonexistence of ghosts, or other phenomena that people see or experience, and believe in, and calling such experiences "evidence". What I am saying is that there are many things that used to be thought of as "supernatural" that are not... and we know this because we can measure it. For crying out loud, people used to think of disease and mental illness as proof of demon possession.... but now we can measure bacteria and the virus, we can say what causes illness. Now we can see into the brain we can understand the physiology of mental illness.

It is not a leap to say that when we build better measuring devices that things we think of as being "supernatural" may one day be accepted as "natural". I think that is the entire point of my posts about string theory, chaos theory, M theory, and the multiverse... we haven't learned how to measure these things yet, but mathematical models are opening up new theories about how we view reality... which would have been even too fantastical to even hypothesize about previously.

If you confine inquiry into the material world that you have instrumentation to measure, you miss out on what could be the biggest scientific breakthroughs that could be imminent... all because you don't want to examine what you do not understand.

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First science assumes everything has a natural cause that is how we discovered the connection between pathogens and disease. If the investigators really thought botulism was caused by demons then why investigate C botulinum? Most certainly no one would have looked for some product of C botulinum that results in illness. In reality researchers knew something grew in improperly preserved meat that made people sick before the bacteria was identified. That is why when the bacteria was identified it was named using the latin word for sausage.

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Second chaos theory is mathematics not science. It is well established and well proven math. It has numerous applications in the real world. It is in no way related to various cosmological speculations.

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Finally string theory and other such speculations, until someone can use them to make testable observations they are simply thought exercises. They might be on to something but they could just as easily be spectacularly wrong. That is why science follows the data.

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ORIGINAL: tweakabelle

JO, in the other thread there was some discussion of the slippage of science from a legitimate research methodology to an ideology/cult. Isn't that what we are witnessing here?

There is an attempt to hijack the research method and incorporate it into the ideology ("Science is Materialism"). The object of enquiry ("Consciousness") is reduced to the only formulation ideologically acceptable (physiological brain function). The limits of research are thus established not on the claimed basis of data, but on ideological grounds. The rules governing proper empirical research are then elevated to the level of dogma. Anything that falls outside the artificial ideological-driven boundaries is rejected out of hand. Despite its wholesale inadequacy, the position is stubbornly maintained through a mixture of denial, mantra repetition (only empircial data is acceptable) and attempts to distort the argument into more familiar territory (Natural vs Supernatural)

Is there any reason NOT to conclude this is remarkably consistent with classic cult behaviour? Sadly, in my observation, pointing out the logical errors and other inadequacies of a cult's belief system is unlikely to achieve the desired effect. Cult members tend to cling religiously to whatever superstition captures them. However some people report success with humouring and indulging the devotees' superstitions until they regain their critical faculties.

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ORIGINAL: mnottertail

we always have been and always will be in that respect, it is a simple matter of the rearragement of atoms........