BrutalAntipathy
Posts: 412
Joined: 7/8/2005 Status: offline
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ORIGINAL: Rule quote:
ORIGINAL: BrutalAntipathy On what grounds do you base this claim? Experience, and my own cosmological hypotheses. So, completely unverifiable then, right. quote:
ORIGINAL: BrutalAntipathy If the information is simply speculative, then there is still no reason to consider the brain as more than a biological function. You are not spiritually aware. Unless and until you can demonstrate the existence of the alleged spiritual world, it is a safe conclusion that you aren't either. quote:
ORIGINAL: BrutalAntipathy Perhaps you could offer supporting data by demonstrating a method by which some spiritual force could make itself known by changing brain function. Simply pray. Pray for rain, or irrigate. Irrigation seems to work best. quote:
ORIGINAL: BrutalAntipathy As it stands, we have evidence in plenty for physical cause of information loss, but zero information on any spiritual cause. I have, but that is private. Do you always make knowledge claims, then insist that they are private? If you aren't going to back up a claim, you might not should make it in the first place. quote:
ORIGINAL: BrutalAntipathy Again, this is speculative. energy is poured into an appliance, yes, but energy and matter are intertwined. They are in essence two sides of the same coin, and doubly so on the quantum level. I was not talking about physics. Spirituality affects us non-causally. It has otherwise nothing to do with energy and matter. You used the term energy/spirit in post # 15 of this thread, implying that the two were one and the same. quote:
ORIGINAL: BrutalAntipathy But information is not energy. Information is a process. We have many ways of distributing information, and these are all based on natural phenomena. sound, text, and tghe like are all physical, not spiritual, manifestations. Spirituality affects physics, but is not part of physics, it is outside of physics. It is impossible to test spirituality in a physics experiment; it has to be experienced - and some people are not able to. What you are saying is analogous to saying that birds only fly in air. Well, penguins fly in water. Spirituality processes information in a way that is independent of matter and energy, because spirituality is outside those phenomena. So if I make the claim that invisible goblins bite people's feet, you believe it? There are after all footless people in the world, and invisible goblins are supernatural. Therefore they must exist, right? If evidence cannot be offered for something, there is no reason for anyone to believe the claim, be that claim invisible foot biting trolls, spirits, or honest politicians. Sorry, but a warm, fuzzy feeling does not constitute proof, even to the experiencer, as they have no way of determining if the feeling was generated by an internal source or an external one. To say that " I heard a voice inside my head, and it said it was an angel, therefore angels exist! " shows only that the experiencer of the voice is unwilling to investigate the phenomena for other possible causes. People hallucinate, blood sugar drops, TIA's occur, even magnetics can trigger odd mental sensations. But if you absolutely insist that evidence is not needed, I have this great used car that I would love to sell to you, sight unseen! Or do you apply a hypocritical criteria to what you want to believe versus what you don't want to believe? I would also insist that penguins swim in the water, and are incapable of flight in any medium. quote:
ORIGINAL: BrutalAntipathy As I mentioned previously, entropy interferes with the function of useable energy. A Dam does not stop the energy potential of a dam, but it makes that energy less useful as it has allowed the kinetic energy of the flowing river to dissipate. Even with information technology, we see a degradation of data upon copying it. A transcriptionist may make errors, a file becomes corrupt, and the wear from playing a vinyl recording causes the recording to deteriorate. Without some mechanism of complexity vastly beyond any that we use for information preservation, the information contained in electrochemical storage inside our minds is going to dissipate into an unrecognisable form shortly after the end of our biological process, just like the snuffed out flame of a candle. What you say is true as far as the physical universe is concerned. Spirituality, however, is not subject to entropy. You are still clinging to what you know. It was many years after the formulation of my cosmological hypotheses that I realized that I had deduced the existence of an information processing system larger than our universe. This astounded me, as I was not at all spiritually inclined. So there you are.
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