cpwm17
cpwm17's JournalI use a similar argument against the requirement to prove the negative
concerning the existence of a god: it's not up to me to prove the negative that a basketball is orbiting Pluto. It's a crazy claim in the first place (it's not a natural object and there's no way it could have gotten there, at least until recently) and it's not possible to prove the negative. But there is good reason to assume the negative.
Likewise, minds are products of physical brains and millions of years of evolution. Minds live in the natural world and don't have superpowers, like a god. An existing god is a far-fetched low-probability event. No one needs to prove the negative for god. No god is the default.
I assume a conscious mind is natural. A conscious mind only being able to exist once would not be natural, if we judge the conscious mind like other natural events. That's how nature works, at least for those things that can be proven. A conscious mind has some difference than other natural processes that behave like they are natural - that is, events that happen with repeatable patterns. But from everything we know about nature, if consciousness is natural, then consciousness needs to act like it's natural and not have limits on how many times it can appear.
Just like the low to zero probability event where all of existence starts with a god, it is a zero probability event for my conscious-self to exist now in all of infinite time if I only got one life. It takes a lot of faith to believe, or even think reasonable, either of these versions of reality.
You made a claim that a particular conscious-self can't ever reapear.
If I were to scientifically verify that something is possible once, I have verified that it is possible any number of times. That's why science works.
If stuff happened in only ones, science won't work. That's the world operated by the whims of a god. There is no evidence for any god.
Consciousness is a natural process. It's not knowable how a brain can make consciousness, but all evidence is that it is created by brain processes.
When we die we are in exactly the same state we were in before we were born. In an infinite universe or multiverse in time or size, anything that is possible will happen an infinite number of times. Since there is no evidence for any dying soul, we are likely to return with the same consciousness in a different body.
The Universe is huge or infinite.
The Universe is astronomically huge and astronomically old. There is also a good chance there is far more beyond our Universe. Given enough chances, the highly improbable becomes guaranteed.
A god is generally defined as a first cause. A god would be far more complex than the most complex life we know, in a form that contradicts all we know that is possible here in our Universe. What are the chances, of all the imaginable starting points, the single starting point of all of existence is this invisible critter with super powers?
A starting point with dumb matter and energy seems infinitely more plausible. Life starting by a low odds event in our ancient and huge Universe is infinitely more likely than the starting pint of all of existence starting with this mysterious critter with super powers.
Free will and consciousness
I consider free will impossible. Free will is an illusion, which is due to how consciousness works.
Free will means your decisions are made directly from your conscious brain. How can that be possible? Our brains are very complicated black boxes. We have no idea what’s going on up there while we are thinking. How can someone claim an ability, free will, when they can’t even begin to explain how they do it? The burden of proof is on those that claim they have this ability of free will.
Many people, especially among the religious, include in free will such things as our sexual preferences and our religious beliefs. These are all things we have no way of controlling. I believe something is true or find someone attractive, or I don’t. I have no choice. I can’t choose to believe in Santa Claus or god nor can I choose to be attracted to men.
We are all products of our genetics and environment, neither one of those we choose at birth. From then, we become what we are based on what we began with and how the environment made us. We have no choice. Any decision we make to affect our condition is based on who we are, which had been made by conditions outside of our control.
We experience inputs to our senses as our brains automatically interpret the inputs. We experience different levels of understanding of the world around us as our brains automatically interpret the world. And we also experience various good and bad feelings (emotions, pain, and pleasure, along with much more subtle feelings) which control our thoughts and actions. In practice, all conscious experience is a mixture of these three types of experiences (sensing, understanding, and feeling), including emotions, which are more complex than just raw feelings. That’s everything in consciousness and they are all only experiences.
Conscious animals make a connection of food with hunger; it may not be a profound understanding, but it is an understanding (or at least a connection) at some level. Driven by its feelings, assisted by its senses and memory, and enabled by its instincts and past learned behavior, the animal can find its food. The strength of the animal’s feelings-experience will determine how well it remembers and learns from the experience. For all animals, including humans, everything in this process is imposed on consciousness.
Conscious non-human animals also have the sensation of being in control. To various degrees, they operate very much like we do. They are all feelings driven. Do people claim that rats have free will?
Everything is imposed on consciousness inside our black boxes. We have no idea how anything is made conscious and we have no idea where our thoughts come from. We experience inputs to our consciousness and stuff happens. We are fooled into thinking we are in control due to the fact that our thoughts and actions are consistent with our feelings.
This process is a clue to the role feelings play and ultimately why we are conscious. I believe that feelings are a device that brains have evolved that force themselves to operate; enabling (and forcing) our brains to give attention to the issue of the moment, think, do, act as one unit, and give the brain criteria for learning and remembering through strength of experience. Without feelings in consciousness, is there another way for a brain to do all of that? So this one function of the brain (feelings in consciousness) kills multiple birds with one stone. Clearly evolution found consciousness very useful.
Feelings in consciousness is a motivational force, of sorts, that the brain itself can’t ignore, without which, complex animated critters would probably be impossible. Without feelings we would not have the capability to do anything at all. We are complete slaves to our feelings and feelings are imposed on our consciousness. It’s impossible to know how brains can create consciousness (seems impossible, but it’s clearly not), but we can recognize that feelings in consciousness are a powerful force.
So we experience feelings and stuff happens, driven by the feelings flywheel. But we can’t explain where our thoughts and decisions come from. When we think, stuff pops into our heads. Without knowing where the thoughts in our heads come from we have no real control of our decisions. We have no free will.
So it is clear to me that consciousness is important, but consciousness does far less than we think, including actually making the ultimate decisions. Without conscious free will, the concepts of heaven and hell make no sense, and retribution in the criminal justice system is immoral. It isn’t consciousness that makes the decisions but it’s consciousness that suffers the consequences. Without conscious free will, the ultimate crime, according to many believers, of believing in a different reality than them is no crime at all.
*edit: additions:
Free will: The thoughts that arise in our conscious minds originate from an unknown place, unchosen by our conscious minds - to choose a thought would mean to already have that thought in your mind, which would mean you didn't just choose your thought (infinite regress). The thought had to have originated from somewhere. It can't be your consciousness, since that would mean your very same consciousness already had that thought in mind.
You can't have a separate consciousness (which is also you) in your mind choosing your thoughts for your consciousness. It makes no sense. Thoughts have to originate from somewhere and it can't be from consciousness. Our conscious minds aren't the authors of our conscious thoughts. Thoughts pop into our conscious minds as we think. Words flow into our conscious minds as we write.
Stuff concerning feelings from: Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, Paperback by Anthony Damasio: professor of neuroscience at the University of Southern California and an Adjunct Professor at the Salk Institute:
page 170 in the pdf in Demasio's book: Descartes Error::
https://bdgrdemocracy.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/descartes-error_antonio-damasio.pdf
previously, background feelings are neither too positive nor too
negative, although they can be perceived as mostly pleasant or
unpleasant. In all probability it is these feelings, rather than emotional
ones, that we experience most frequently in a lifetime. We are
only subtly aware of a background feeling, but aware enough to be
able to report instantly on its quality. A background feeling is not
what we feel when we jump out of our skin for sheer joy, or when we
are despondent over lost love; both of these actions correspond to
emotional body states. A background feeling corresponds instead to
the body state prevailing between emotions. When we feel happiness,
anger, or another emotion, the background feeling has been
superseded by an emotional feeling. The background feeling is our
image of the body landscape when it is not shaken by emotion. The
concept of "mood," though related to that of background feeling,
does not exactly capture it. When background feelings are persistently
of the same type over hours and days, and do not change
quietly as thought contents ebb and flow, the collection of background
feelings probably contributes to a mood, good, bad, or
indifferent.
We always feel something. I believe the subtle variations through time of our (background) feelings are critical to the moment to moment operation of the conscious mind.
page 93 in the pdf in Demasio's book: Descartes Error:
to propose that there is a particular region in the human brain
where the systems concerned with emotion/feeling, attention, and
working memory interact so intimately that they constitute the
source for the energy of both external action (movement) and internal
action (thought animation, reasoning). This fountainhead region
is the anterior cingulate cortex, another piece of the limbic system
puzzle...
Damage to this sector not only produces impairment
in movement, emotion, and attentiveness, but also causes a virtual
suspension of the animation of action and of thought process such
that reason is no longer viable. The story of one of my patients in
whom there was such damage gives an idea of the impairment.
The stroke suffered by this patient, whom I will call Mrs. T,
produced extensive damage to the dorsal and medial regions of the
frontal lobe in both hemispheres. She suddenly became motionless
and speechless, and she would lie in bed with her eyes open but with
a blank facial expression; I have often used the term "neutral" to
convey the equanimity-or absence-of such an expression.
Her body was no more animated than her face. She might make a
normal movement with arm and hand, to pull her bed covers for
instance, but in general, her limbs were in repose. When asked
about her situation, she usually would remain silent, although after much
coaxing she might say her name, or the names of her husband and
children, or the name of the town where she lived. But she would not
tell you about her medical history, past or present, and she could
not describe the events leading to her admission to the hospital.
There was no way of knowing, then, whether she had no recollection
of those events or whether she had a recollection but was unwilling
or unable to talk about it. She never became upset with my insistent
questioning, never showed a flicker of worry about herself or anything
else. Months later, as she gradually emerged from this state of
mutism and akinesia (lack of movement), and began to answer
questions, she would clarify the mystery of her state of mind. Contrary
to what one might have thought, her mind had not been
imprisoned in the jail of her immobility. Instead it appeared that
there had not been much mind at all, no real thinking or reasoning.
The passivity in her face and body was the appropriate reflection of
her lack of mental animation. At this later date she was certain about
not having felt anguished by the absence of communication. Nothing
had forced her not to speak her mind. Rather, as she recalled,
"I really had nothing to say."
To my eyes Mrs. T had been unemotional. To her experience, all
the while, it appears she had had no feelings. To my eyes she had not
specifically attended to the external stimuli presented to her, nor had
she attended internally to their representation or to the representation
of correlated evocations. I would say her will had been preempted,
and that seems also to have been her reflection.
Reagan continued his attacks against Lebanese targets
that he had done before the Marines were killed. Reagan put the Marines in Lebanon while supporting Israel's destruction of much of Lebanon and while supporting one side of a civil war.
After the Marines were killed, the battleship USS New Jersey shelled Lebanese targets. I remember that well. I hated Reagan for those terrorist attacks. At least one member of US Congress blasted Reagan for his indiscriminate shelling of Lebanon, calling it immoral. I think it was US Senator John Glenn, but I can't find a link.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Beirut_barracks_bombings
http://www.thehypertexts.com/American%20Fascism.htm
Here is a quick two-week chronology of the events that preceded the car-bombing attack that resulted in the deaths of 241 American marines:...
9/11/1983: The battleship USS New Jersey (BB-62) was alerted for rapid deployment to the Eastern Mediterranean.
9/12/1983: The USS New Jersey refueled in Colon, Panama, then began a high-speed run east, averaging 25 knots per hour.
9/12/1983: A Marine Amphibious Unit arrived off Lebanon and assumed a standby role.
9/16/1983: The destroyer USS John Rodgers (DD-983) and frigate USS Bowen fired five-inch shells into Syrian-controlled parts of Lebanon.
9/19/1983: The USS John Rodgers and USS Virginia (CGN-38) fired 338 five-inch shells at the Shouf Mountain village of Suq al Gharb.
9/20/1983: The USS John Rodgers and USS Virginia fired more shells.
9/21/1983: The USS John Rodgers and USS Arthur Radford (DD-968) fired more shells.
9/23/1983: The USS Virginia employed 155mm artillery fire and five-inch gunfire; French planes struck the Bekaa Valley.
9/25/1983: USS New Jersey arrived off the Lebanese coast.
9/26/1983: There was an immediate cease-fire, but the outgunned insurgents would soon resort to unconventional methods...
Someone else also strongly opposed American entry into the war, and its killing of civilians. Osama Bin Laden would later state that when he saw the results of the US shelling of Lebanon: "God knows it did not cross our minds to attack the towers. But after the situation became unbearable and we witnessed the injustice and tyranny of the American-Israeli alliance against our people in Palestine and Lebanon, I thought about it. And the events that affected me directly were that of 1982 and the events that followed—when America allowed the Israelis to invade Lebanon, helped by the US Sixth Fleet. In those difficult moments, many emotions came over me that are hard to describe, but that produced an overwhelming desire to reject injustice and a strong determination to punish the unjust. As I watched the destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me to punish the unjust the same way and to destroy towers in America so it could taste some of what we are tasting and stop killing our children and women."
What is this free will that you speak of?
We are the products of our genetics and environment, neither of which we have any choice at birth. After that, we think and act based on how our brains have developed in our environment. We don't design our own brains, so our conscious selves don't ultimately control our actions and thoughts. If you believe in a god, then this god is responsible for who we are.
Free will is an illusion. We don't understand how our brains work or how they come to their conclusions. Our heads are black boxes.
We experience inputs into our brains and we experience outputs from our brains. What our brains actually do, we can't know. We experience feelings associated with our thoughts and action. This gives us the illusion that our conscious selves actually made the decision. But our feelings only drive our thoughts and actions by forcing our (outside of conscious) brains to act.
Even when you use sequential logic, ultimately your thoughts come out of your black box.
There is no free will. That is just an excuse for this imaginary god for not being able to see the future and the flaws in creation. God says, the buck don't stop here.
It's not a crazy conspiracy theory,
it's just the basic corruption that dominates Washington DC. (I don't do crazy: Oswald did it, I support GMO's, truthers are kooks, an invisible man in the sky doesn't control the Universe, etc)
Most politicians don't care about any particular agenda. Most of them do at any particular moment what they believe will get them reelected. In the Bush administration, the Neocons set the agenda, with their targets of Iraq, Syria, Libya. and Iran, all nations that are enemies of the terrorists that committed 9-11. Neocons are open about their agenda to destroy those nations for the benefit of Israel. It's not a secret.
9-11 was a fortuitous gift to the Neocons, though a major terrorist attack was highly predictable due to US human rights abuses and atrocities in the ME that we had been committing for decades. I wasn't the least bit surprised on 9-11.
The Neocons are conspiracy kooks, and US foreign policy is what you get when conspiracy kooks get power in government. They were able to scam the US public to support an unprovoked attack against a random Muslim majority nation because they are part of a nefarious "axis of evil." Iraq was part of some great Muslim conspiracy.
The Neocons set the agenda, and now that they got the predictable results, most politicians are now doing what they think needs to be done with the current facts on the ground, which gives us permanent war.
Many politicians are also open about their threats against Iran for the benefit of Israel. We are supporting the terrorists against Syria because the Israel supporters care more about weakening Assad's power than the kooks that want to create a theocracy in Syria and Al Qaeda that attacked the US.
Washington DC is much more complicated than I can write in a few paragraphs, since there are so many agendas, but this is an important element of our war agenda.
Your god pushes the question of the beginning infinitely back in time with a magical being,
unless you believe your god had a creator. Then where did your god's creator come from?
You have the same problem of original creation, and you've created a much worse problem: how did this almost infinitely purposefully-complex critter get here?
My starting point is dumb matter and energy. Your starting point is an almost infinitely purposefully-complex critter with magical powers. We also have no evidence for your invisible magic-critter – or however you define your god.
No matter what view of reality you believe in, whether scientific or not, there is a reality that exists that didn't create itself. The scientific view is to simplify things down to their basic processes going back in time: the more complex comes from the less complex. The religious view is the complex is explained by the even more complex, which is explained by magic.
It's the burden of the theists to demonstrate the signatures of god in nature,
and if they can't, then the default position is there is no god.
Science works since much of nature can be understood. Nature can be understood since there are patterns in nature. Nature isn't infinitely complicated since it isn't driven by the whims of a higher power. If it were, science couldn't work.
From a human perspective, nature is far from perfect. People are born with birth defects. Animals eat other animals, causing great suffering. There have been a number of major extinction events in the history of the Earth. These, and many more examples, are the signature of a world operating without a higher power.
Our Universe didn't come from literally nothing. Nothing doesn't exist. The Big Bang came from an existing physics in some realm that it is currently impossible to understand. I think it is very likely that we live in one of a huge number of universes that came from the same realm and by similar physics that created our Universe, since nature doesn't make things in ones and a multiverse does a good job of explaining much about our existence. There could also very well be other realms beyond that, unrelated to ours with realities unlike our own.
A reality with a starting point with a god is almost infinitely less likely than a reality with a starting point of dumb matter and energy. A god would be almost infinitely more complicated with purposeful design. Dumb matter and energy doesn't necessarily have purposeful design.
The design of life on Earth came from 4,000,000,000 years of evolution. But this God would have magically gotten its purposeful design from nothing. We also have direct evidence of dumb matter and energy, but we have no evidence for any god.
Consciousness is the product of brain processes, evolved over millions of years to allow complex animated beings. Consciousness isn't a thing. It is very likely that there are numerous other places beyond Earth with conscious beings, and likely in other universes outside our own.
good links
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Name: PaulGender: Male
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