(November 4, 2015 at 10:14 am)robvalue Wrote: OK so I've been on this forum for over a year now. I've listened to hundreds of hours of The Atheist Experience and other theistic discussion type stuff. The results so far:

Step 1: Define god. What is a god?

Answer.... lsdkfmlsdfmwegnwiegnpwiegnwipengpdnsfnsfspdf

So, yeah. I haven't even been able to move on to asking any questions about it because even people who talk to it constantly have no idea what it is.
Also, I realized that religious theists have barely been able to make me understand why they are part of their religion. The only two things I've heard which sound actually honest and convincing to some degree are:
A) That's how I was raised
B) I'm scared to leave the religion
Everything else I've been told does not sound like the real reason. I feel people either don't know the real reason themselves, or are loathe to discuss it. They may fully believe they are telling me the real reason, but I am not convinced that it actually is. Often they present rationalizations that wouldn't convince a drunk zebra. And logical arguments which fall way short of their particular religion, even if they were valid.
Weird. If anyone truly wanted to convince me to join a religion, they should really be able to explain to me exactly why they are part of that religion. If that explanation sounds bogus, what chance do they have of recruiting me?

You are correct Rob.
When i was little and my sex hormones didn't yet kicked in i could not understand why two people kissing  would have fun.
It took few more years to understand that.
To understand God require one to grow up too.
You just can't pretend that a small consciousness can grasp the importance to merge into the big consciousness.  

Losty!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(November 4, 2015 at 10:53 am)Little Rik Wrote: Are you sure Evie?  

He's doing it again!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(November 4, 2015 at 10:53 am)Little Rik Wrote:

(November 4, 2015 at 10:36 am)Evie Wrote: NDEs are not science numbnuts.

Oh, sure.
Science is everything.
It can even show us how to find permanent peace of mind which is what human beings are after all the time.
Can it?
Are we sure?
Are you sure Evie?  

Yeah because wanting permanent peace of mind to be "shown" to us is an argument 

(November 4, 2015 at 11:03 am)Little Rik Wrote:

(November 4, 2015 at 10:14 am)robvalue Wrote: OK so I've been on this forum for over a year now. I've listened to hundreds of hours of The Atheist Experience and other theistic discussion type stuff. The results so far:

Step 1: Define god. What is a god?

Answer.... lsdkfmlsdfmwegnwiegnpwiegnwipengpdnsfnsfspdf

So, yeah. I haven't even been able to move on to asking any questions about it because even people who talk to it constantly have no idea what it is.
Also, I realized that religious theists have barely been able to make me understand why they are part of their religion. The only two things I've heard which sound actually honest and convincing to some degree are:
A) That's how I was raised
B) I'm scared to leave the religion
Everything else I've been told does not sound like the real reason. I feel people either don't know the real reason themselves, or are loathe to discuss it. They may fully believe they are telling me the real reason, but I am not convinced that it actually is. Often they present rationalizations that wouldn't convince a drunk zebra. And logical arguments which fall way short of their particular religion, even if they were valid.
Weird. If anyone truly wanted to convince me to join a religion, they should really be able to explain to me exactly why they are part of that religion. If that explanation sounds bogus, what chance do they have of recruiting me?

You are correct Rob.
When i was little and my sex hormones didn't yet kicked in i could not understand why two people kissing  would have fun.
It took few more years to understand that.
To understand God require one to grow up too.
You just can't pretend that a small consciousness can grasp the importance to merge into the big consciousness.  

believing in God is believing in fairy stories, to evolve into a "grown up," one needs to give up said fairy stories.

The prattle about consciousness is yet another example of you attempting to use big words, mashing them together in what seems like any order and trying to pass them off as some kind of grand revelation.

It's poppycock, all of it, it means absolutely nothing.

(November 4, 2015 at 10:53 am)Little Rik Wrote: Oh, sure.
Science is everything.
It can even show us how to find permanent peace of mind [...]

Yes. It's called "medication". You should try it some time...

(November 4, 2015 at 8:50 am)Little Rik Wrote: Has already been established that consciousness is not something physical as our physical senses can not grasp it so if is not physical what else can be other that something non physical.

Quote:The man’s name and his reasons for shooting himself— insanity? anguish? ennui?— are lost to history. But in early 1861 a Frenchman near Paris dug the business end of a pistol into his forehead and pulled the trigger. He missed. Not completely: his frontal skull bone was shattered and flipped upward like a fin. But his brain escaped unscathed. The man’s doctor could in fact see the brain pulsating through the open wound— and couldn’t resist reaching for a metal spatula. Unsure whether the fellow would pass out, scream, or perhaps convulse and die, the doctor pressed the spatula down gently at various points and asked him how he felt. Although no one recorded the answer, you can imagine what the man had on his mind, so to speak. “J’ai mal à la tête, docteur. C’est—” Nothing had happened so far, but when the doctor pressed one particular spot, near the back of the frontal lobe, the man’s words were snapped in two: he suddenly couldn’t speak. The moment the doctor lifted the spatula, the man started up again. “Sacre bleu, doct—” The doctor pressed again, and again strangled his words. This happened over and over— each press left him sputtering, mute.

Kean, Sam (2014-05-06). The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Human Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery (p. 301). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition.

Sounds pretty physical to me, Mr. "has been established". Spatula, brain, inability to talk. Physical interaction affecting mind.

(July 28, 2014 at 4:01 pm)Jörmungandr Wrote: A case description of cerebral achromatopsia: [Cerebral achromatopsia is a type of color-blindness caused by damage to the cerebral cortex of the brain]

The Case Of The Colorblind Painter

Quote:It is almost two years since Mr. I. lost his color vision. The intense sorrow that was so characteristic at first, as he sat for hours before his (to him) black lawn, desperately trying to perceive or imagine it as green, has disappeared, as has the revulsion (he no longer sees his wife, or himself, as having "rat-colored" flesh).

There has, we think, been in his case a real "forgetting" of color — a forgetting at once psychological and physiological, at once strategic and structural. Perhaps this has to occur in someone who is no longer able to imagine or remember, or in any physiologically based way generate, a lost mode of perception. It does not, by contrast, happen in those who have become ordinarily blind or deaf, but their cerebral cortices, their powers of inner representation, are unimpaired; it is quite different for the blind or deaf, who become not only unseeing or unhearing, but as if they had never been seeing or hearing, as did a patient with cortical blindness described by one of us (see Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, Summit Books, 1985, p. 39).

More evidence that physical changes cause mental changes in consciousness.

(July 30, 2014 at 11:54 am)Jörmungandr Wrote:

(July 28, 2014 at 6:29 pm)bennyboy Wrote: A more blunt observation could have been made, though-- if you shoot someone through the brain, they will no longer experience qualia.

Except that in this case the painter did continue to experience qualia, just certain components of that qualia were missing. So that wouldn't be a fair observation at all. It's reminiscent of when I challenged ChadWooters argument about veridicality of experience with the example of blindness anosognosia. His response was that you can't tell much from broken brains. This is precisely wrong. You can tell a great deal about ordinary consciousness from broken brains. In this case, part of the brain is missing, and correspondingly, part of the qualia is missing. The brain damage revealed how tightly connected to brain function the experience of qualia is.

Has been established my shiny metal ass.

(November 4, 2015 at 1:41 pm)Jörmungandr Wrote: More evidence that physical changes cause mental changes in consciousness.

Has been established my shiny metal ass.

I'd like to see that .. shiny or not.

Well I was gonna say myself

But I resisted.

Jormungandy, could you please post a picture of your exquisite derriere for Evie and I to .. uh .. ogle.

I'm saying nothing

I myself didn't actually ask okay!