(Yesterday at 1:35 pm)Angrboda Wrote:

(Yesterday at 1:20 pm)Deesse23 Wrote: That guy cant be real. Nobody is legitimately that dumb. I see only one plausible scenario: Homeschooling. He has not answered the question about having been homeschooled, like he didnt directly answer my question about his scientific education. I dont know homeschooled people since homeschooling is not legal in my country, but i have been told that real dumb people can be the result of real dumb (and religious) parents educating them in social isolation.

Every other scenario seems....inconceivable to me (pun intended).

I actually own that one. I get depressed that so many, many people don’t get the reference. I’ve also got one of the ‘You Silly English Kniggits’ shirts and people - strangers, no less -  come up and point out the spelling error.

*sigh*

Boru

(Yesterday at 1:36 pm)Deesse23 Wrote:

(Yesterday at 1:31 pm)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: To be fair, he did say he’s ’not well versed in science.’ Which, I reckon, is the reason for his over-arching, mind-wobbling, world class reliance on incredulity.

Boru

In..credible, isnt it?

So in..credible I can hardly conceive it.

Boru

(September 1, 2026 at 10:58 pm)Ravenshire Wrote: A rock, when dropped experiences gravitational attraction, making it fall. It experiences g-forces upon impact with the ground, sometimes sufficient to fragment it. Neither of those experiences lead to rocks having sentience. You seem to be twisting and misrepresenting their words as much as you twist and misrepresent the words of other posters, as you have done to my posts.

If we're being strict about words, your use of "experiences" here is... nonstandard at best. 

"Experience" is normally used to mean that there is some inner consciousness of an event. Here is Merriam Webster: 



Note that all of these involve personal awareness of something. Rocks don't have that, unless you're agreeing that they do have some kind of simple inner life. 

Quote:Your ignorant, disingenuous, and just plain dumb.

*You're

(Yesterday at 3:52 pm)Belacqua Wrote:

(September 1, 2026 at 10:58 pm)Ravenshire Wrote: A rock, when dropped experiences gravitational attraction, making it fall. It experiences g-forces upon impact with the ground, sometimes sufficient to fragment it. Neither of those experiences lead to rocks having sentience. You seem to be twisting and misrepresenting their words as much as you twist and misrepresent the words of other posters, as you have done to my posts.

If we're being strict about words, your use of "experiences" here is... nonstandard at best. 

"Experience" is normally used to mean that there is some inner consciousness of an event. Here is Merriam Webster: 

---

1
a
: direct observation of or participation in events as a basis of knowledge
Charlotte was naturally patient. She knew from experience that if she waited long enough, a fly would come to her web …
—E. B. White
b
: the fact or state of having been affected by or gained knowledge through direct observation or participation
In my experience, those dedicated to practical change over the long term are often the least involved in the dramas of rage …
—Rebecca Solnit
2
a
: practical knowledge, skill, or practice gained from direct observation of or participation in events or in a particular activity
has firsthand experience solving these kinds of problems
b
: the length of such participation
has 10 years' experience in the job
3
: something personally encountered, undergone, or lived through
wrote about their experiences as a pilot
4
a
: the conscious events that make up an individual life
… the things that make twins different from each other, such as life experience.
—Emil F. Coccaro
… the historical strength of family and community, kinship and neighbors within the black experience.
—Manning Marable
b
: the events that make up the conscious past of a community or nation or humankind generally
… a teacher resource manual pertaining to the experience of Americans of Japanese ancestry …
—The Japanese American Citizens League
5
: the act or process of directly perceiving events or reality
Experience is a matter of the interaction of organism with its environment …
—John Dewey

---

Note that all of these involve personal awareness of something. Rocks don't have that, unless you're agreeing that they do have some kind of simple inner life. 

Quote:Your ignorant, disingenuous, and just plain dumb.

*You're

Bosh. If I say my car ‘experienced’ mechanical difficulties, everyone knows what I mean. I grant that it’s anthropomorphic to an extent, but its pretty standard usage.

I left in a deliberate grammatical error so you can feel better about yourself.

Boru

(Yesterday at 3:52 pm)Belacqua Wrote: Rocks don't have that

Tell that to the dipshit OP.

(Yesterday at 3:52 pm)Belacqua Wrote:

(September 1, 2026 at 10:58 pm)Ravenshire Wrote: A rock, when dropped experiences gravitational attraction, making it fall. It experiences g-forces upon impact with the ground, sometimes sufficient to fragment it. Neither of those experiences lead to rocks having sentience. You seem to be twisting and misrepresenting their words as much as you twist and misrepresent the words of other posters, as you have done to my posts.

If we're being strict about words, your use of "experiences" here is... nonstandard at best. 

"Experience" is normally used to mean that there is some inner consciousness of an event. Here is Merriam Webster: 

---

1
a
: direct observation of or participation in events as a basis of knowledge
Charlotte was naturally patient. She knew from experience that if she waited long enough, a fly would come to her web …
—E. B. White
b
: the fact or state of having been affected by or gained knowledge through direct observation or participation
In my experience, those dedicated to practical change over the long term are often the least involved in the dramas of rage …
—Rebecca Solnit
2
a
: practical knowledge, skill, or practice gained from direct observation of or participation in events or in a particular activity
has firsthand experience solving these kinds of problems
b
: the length of such participation
has 10 years' experience in the job
3
: something personally encountered, undergone, or lived through
wrote about their experiences as a pilot
4
a
: the conscious events that make up an individual life
… the things that make twins different from each other, such as life experience.
—Emil F. Coccaro
… the historical strength of family and community, kinship and neighbors within the black experience.
—Manning Marable
b
: the events that make up the conscious past of a community or nation or humankind generally
… a teacher resource manual pertaining to the experience of Americans of Japanese ancestry …
—The Japanese American Citizens League
5
: the act or process of directly perceiving events or reality
Experience is a matter of the interaction of organism with its environment …
—John Dewey

---

Note that all of these involve personal awareness of something. Rocks don't have that, unless you're agreeing that they do have some kind of simple inner life. 

Quote:Your ignorant, disingenuous, and just plain dumb.

*You're

Thanks for pointing that out. Actually that was my reading as well. I had read it as something like "a degree of consciousness" or, in my unorthodox terminology, a "negligible sentience".  Ravenshire seemed to be indicating it was dumb of me to read it that way, and I really didn't want to debate the point. But thanks for raising this possibility.

(Yesterday at 1:30 pm)Angrboda Wrote:

(Yesterday at 12:21 pm)Jal Wrote: I am not an occasionalist, and I don't believe that God moves everything. Human themselves are self-moving in my view, in fact most all living creatures self-locomote.

God simply enacts the forces of nature (gravity, magnetism, electricity, etc).

According to the view you have laid out, the self has no power to locomote.  At bottom, we are independent particles suspended in a vacuum.  It is only through these forces that God mediates that we locomote.  It doesn't sound like you understand your own framework.  That or you believe something counter-factual, that we are held together by something different from and apart from God.  We aren't.

Self-locomotion by free will is largely the crux of my OP. In my view, most particles of matter don't realize this potential, either because (A) God stifles it as part of His design for this world, or (B) because negligibly sentient particles cannot muster much free will,  or both A and B.

As I mentioned earlier, God has liberally/generously awakened/fostered this potential for self-locomotion in small fragments of matter known as souls. 
Which He normally keeps hidden from our eyes and mechanical instruments of detection.

Thus while my body in itself, to use your words, "has no power to locomote" and, left to itself would thus be a mere deterministic domino, nonetheless my soul, self-propelled by free will, animates/locomotes my body.

I thought I made it clear that my whole project on this thread was to postulate a libertarian free will as a necessary corrective to determinism.

Yet oddly enough you keep lumping me with determinism. I really don't get it.

(Yesterday at 1:35 pm)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote:

(September 1, 2026 at 5:17 pm)Jal Wrote: Oh? Did you want me to focus on your genitalia question? No, I don't believe the Father and the Son have opted to endue themselves with human-like genitalia.

Therefore, the Father and Son are not ‘shaped like a man’ are they?

Boru

(Sigh). No need to be this nitpicky? One needn't have genitalia to be generally shaped like a man.  

Suppose you witnessed a murder. The police asked you if the perp looked like a man or a woman. You replied, "Looked like a man to me."

I think that statement would be accurate enough even if you had noticed that this perp had been castrated.

In the Bible, angels on scene were sometimes perceived as men. I really doubt that any genitalia was implied there. 

At least that's my reading. If you insist that the Bible predicates genitalia of Father and Son, I'm not sure I could prove you wrong, because I haven't given it any thought or study.

One wonders, if it’s the soul that experiences and doesn’t interact in any detectable way…what the brains and eyes and guts and all the rest are for. Trickster gods are fun.

(Yesterday at 9:34 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: One wonders, if it’s the soul that experiences and doesn’t interact in any detectable way…what the brains and eyes and guts and all the rest are for.  Trickster gods are fun.

Traditional Christian psychology is sheer idiocy precisely because it can't address that question. If, as they say, the mind/soul is immaterial, how can it interact with a material brain? And how would one impact the other?  If a car accident causes brain damage, the mind's thinking is impaired - so clearly there is interaction and/or mutual influence.

Mutual influence is easily explained in a monistic material pansychism.

God designed the brain for His own pleasure, to foster a dynamic pleasing to Him. (He delights in His clay dolls). In this somewhat aesthetic dynamic, the purpose of the brain is to help ORGANIZE the soul's currents of thought. Although the brain doesn't, to an absolute degree,  rigidly/ deterministically/ exhaustively rule/control the soul's currents of thought,  it at least nudges those thought-currents to tend to flow in general directions/patterns conducive to pragamatically useful experiences such as hunger, thirst, pain, the five senses, conscience, libido, emotions, emotional balance, deductive logic, humor, etc.

You asked about the eyes? That's just an optical intake for the brain, right? The eyes modulate light impulses in expert ways useful to inform the brain of our surroundings, that is, inform the mind/soul which is situated within the brain. (Actually I understand the soul to be distributed from head to toe). 

Guts? Our body dies  (i.e. undergoes mechanical failure) without a digestive system, fuel, oxygen, etc - right?

To summarize, the above hopefully clarifies the mind-body relationship.