arithma
How do we understand the constituents of an entity. By poking it. If you're in the dark, with a stone in your hand, and you throw it forward. It hits and makes a thunk sound. The thing in front of you is probably made of matter.
Now apply the same logic to consciousness. Take hard sedatives. Record what you speak. Listen to it again when you're back to your full mental state. Compare to your usual conversation. You'll realize that consciousness can be "poked" by chemicals. Does consciousness require something beyond chemical and electric build up to exist? There's no reason to think so, and there are no phenomenon so far to suggest the need for such. As such, you can by simple experiments ground your "mind" to physical reality and rule out the probability of any supernatural manifestation.
Other experiments to consider on the brain: Blood flow effects. De-oxygenation of the brain. Matter deformation (place a crayon through your eye into your brain). Electrical (deprive yourself from nutrients that are necessary for the electric carriers in the brain (potassium, calcium among others)). Chemical: plenty of psychotic drugs.
Psychology: It's a science that tries to capture the reactions of people. How is that even possible if people were not bound by motives, instincts, and orderly physical laws?
Questions to ponder: How different are we from computers? What does it take for a microprocessor to obtain a soul? Is a soul necessary at all to describe a human (as a recipe)?
Evolution: Imagine two early humans. Both of them learned they were eventually going to die by observing the elderly. One of them gets depressed because he knew for sure he was going to die as well and ended up dieing too soon because of that depression. The other one tricked himself that he will be alive well after he dies. The strategy was a success, and he procreated to give birth to many afterlife believers that are us.
The only life that you leave after you're dead is your offspring, and your eventually rotting body. There's no need to worry though, you won't even notice it.
On the other hand, you can believe for whatever reason, that death really isn't, and continue as if there were no worry at all. Most people do to obtain happiness and relief anxiety of fear of death. It works until you know otherwise.
Nemesis-301
it really comes down to your faith and belief in God, as a Christian I am fully certain that the afterlife exists because in The Bible, it is written Luke 23:43 "And Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, Today shalt thou be with me in Paradise"
if you're an atheist you couldn't possibly believe in the afterlife, sure you can say that psychologically it makes you more comfortable believing that life doesn't just end, but how could you know?
for the afterlife not to exist you have to disprove the existence of God which I think is impossible, and you have to disprove anything related in between such as: Angels, demons, ghosts, spirits, exorcisms, fortune tellers...like I said it all comes down to how strongly you believe in God.
sorry if I turned it into something religious but its very much related to it...
Kassem
Nemesis-301 wroteyou have to disprove anything related in between such as: Angels, demons, ghosts, spirits, exorcisms, fortune tellers
Even in mono-theistic faiths, among the things I've quoted only angels, demons and spirits exist. The others are just ideas made up by commoners.
Beej
Ill start like this, logically if i am a plant or an animal or any other form of life (that is not human), what makes me different than man? I envy him for all the blessings he have. Surely i can surpass him in age/strength/speed/agility..etc. But he still has an advantage over me, which is his brain and mind.
With that, man thought of life. Is this it? Do i have a biological hour? I just live for a few years and die?
Thankfully , since i am a muslim, i believe in the afterlife. Most religions do , not just talking lebanese religions here.
Man created ghosts (different from angels and demons) , the restless souls of humans that cannot find peace, etc. Why did we do so? Because of this emptiness that creeps upon us when we have nothing to do. When we are at home, we finished school/uni/job, etc. We have free time we start to think about things like that. We sail into our imagination, and try to answer the question that does not have a logically scientific answer. What's next? Man loves the idea of a time machine... Why because it gives us hope into answering this question. What's next?
We should be thankful that man is not operating the world, or we would have perished along time ago. Think about it if it was possibility that controlled this world... If it was "chaos" that controlled every breath we take. We should be living in a world where life = death, water = land, normal = mutated following the 50/50 possibility.
We all studied genetics, i am studying it in uni. You would be amazed by the precision that things operate in our body. Its almost too good to be true. Too good to be "chance" and still it make errors. We see enzymes (dna/rna polymerases) making error suddenly it blinds us from all the right things it has already done. We love the empty side of things, so much that it over shadows the bright even if it was an atom.
On a hormone based level, everything can be translated down to hormons. Whether you like it or not, every stimulation that happens in your body, triggers a hormon that stimulates something to do something.(endocrinology course :P i Aced that bad boy). Anyway love/feelings/sadness/anger..etc are all stimulated. thus they will affect the K Na in your blood, increase BP and heart rate and will, biologically hurt your body. Thus man is most probably will live a shorter life. But you see its not a general rule. We have seen people with cancer, and i mean the most vicious type of cancer outliving other healthy people. I thought science told us that this man will live for few weeks!? What happend? Science still cant interpret things, thus leaving them to coincidence/chance/luck...every other term u can make up. But devine intrusion. Since we are blessed by this brain, we think that we are number 1 over anything, at all. We cant create things. We only join things that we saw into something new, but its not creation.
People blame god for others misfortune, for war, hunger and famine.etc These are the work of man. We made other countries sick, we increased our mortality due to pollution. We poke into the earth and start detonating things under the earth's crust so we can benefit from the underlying heat..etc Its just physics, every reaction has an equal and opposite reaction. It might not be equal, but there is a reaction. Pollution and the excess use of wave in electronics/communication, internet..etc. Have shown it is the reason we have breast cancer... Instead of finding alternatives, we seek more destruction.
Nasa a few months ago showcased the most powerful laser. Instead of researching for the most accurate laser. We seek our own destruction.
Isn't it ironic? If we fear the end, if we look at the end of the tunnel, and hope and pray, and cling to our last breath.. we are speeding things up.
Sadly this is what i call, forced overclock of mans life :P. We are overclocking ourselves. We operate faster but our components burn faster :) (i had to throw a little bit of humor in there).
Some say that religion is written inside of you already. When you are born. No one tells you its wrong to kill... But then again no one tells you not to take things that are not yours. Our consciousness, the good one i mean- you know the one that keeps you awake in your bed when your trying to sleep because you fought with a parent, is empty at first and is filled later by our parents. And what laws we should follow, but in the end these where to taught to us by whom? By messengers and by religions.
I might have swayed from the topic but i hope that i didn't, i was merely rotating around it. I hope this thread remains calm, and away from locks. Drop all the hate here people we are just brain storming. We each have our own thoughts/view of life and how we live it. Never force anything on anyone. I hope we understand each other here after all we all share same thing. We do have a soul ;).
Joe
@Everyone:
These subject is considered a sensitive one, and according to the Etiquette should be locked down.
However, the tone of the topic has been calm and respectful, therefore I see no reason why we should intervene.
I'll let this thread open, and encourage (just like Beej did) calm and reasonable conversation. However, should things get out of hands, the topic will be closed instantly.
Help us keep this forum friendly. Thanks.
jsaade
Religion was thought of when no-one could explain stuff like death and the afterlife.
I consider myself a believer by choice not by force.
I believe God exists but i do not believe in religions, people interpret the existence of this spirit by following religions, religions led by men.
I cannot criticize any person's belief, that is a petsonal choice and flavor (according to me).
Death is a milestone in our timeline. Like birth it is both scary and magical.
Vartan
“All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think we become.”
Buddha
my idea is, that we create everything we believe, and create the proof to believe it more. if someone uses his logic more than his feeling he will see trough his belief.. "this is my personal idea just sharing"
xterm
Vartan wrote“All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think we become.”
Buddha
my idea is, that we create everything we believe, and create the proof to believe it more. if someone uses his logic more than his feeling he will see trough his belief.. "this is my personal idea just sharing"
Law of Attraction much? :-)
P.S arithma! Easy on the meta physics!
hussam
In the online game that I play, someone who is a church priest in real life asked me a question once. Seeing as my name is Arabic which means I'm a Muslim, he wanted my opinion on stuff. We sort of agreed on everything.
Then the topic of God and afterlife popped up. I told him I believe god exists. I'm not a religious person and I don't pray. But I know god exists for some reason. He said I have something called sensus divinitatis.
Edit: my post may not be completely related to the discussion but I thought I'd share anyway :P
rtp
whatever floats your boat ^_^
I personally don't believe in life after death and I cant perceive a god that is omnipresent and omnipotent that need angels...
scorz
The world is not such, we made it such.
God created the universe and gave him full liberty to evolute and create life, arriving to humans after millions of years; Even in the atoms or quarks there is some kind of life and soul.
And the resurrection would be to the whole universe, everything that came from God would come back to him.
Everything will be saved through the human
That was the Christian-philosophical idea of Teilhard de Chardin.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Teilhard_de_Chardin
So life after death can be explained as a meta-physics theory like traveling to another dimensions, getting back in time to the zero-day...
As a believer first, I do believe in Christianity. Nowadays, being a Christians leaders is not being it literally as the old Christians thought. That's why Christians can go to church or not, leave their religion without being killed.
(PS: In Lebanon it's hard to believe such thing, because it's all politics :P so consider yourself in a first world country)
We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.
So to end this reply, Ill just paste some bible verse that I am trying to base my moral and spiritual life on it:
'Love your neighbor as yourself.' Mark 12:31
Do to others as you would have them do to you. Luke 6:31
proners
Now apply the same logic to consciousness. Take hard sedatives. Record what you speak. Listen to it again when you're back to your full mental state. Compare to your usual conversation. You'll realize that consciousness can be "poked" by chemicals. Does consciousness require something beyond chemical and electric build up to exist? There's no reason to think so, and there are no phenomenon so far to suggest the need for such. As such, you can by simple experiments ground your "mind" to physical reality and rule out the probability of any supernatural manifestation.
Scientists don't understand even 1% per cent of the brain functionality. They can describe some phenomena (like point n shoot :P), they can poke it with a few chemicals but that's basically it.
To say such a lifeform as human beings came from nothingness or a bang is laughable at best. Like an old wise man(أبو حنيفة النعمان) once replied when he was asked why he was late to agreed date with some atheists, he jokingly said that he was waiting for the woods to become a boat so he can cross the river :P
hussam
Also maybe we could steer away from how life started on earth or else we'll end up with a endless discussion on how amino acids can form instead of discussing the actual topic.
arithma
This reply is a special one for proners. I try to keep it as underpinning what am thinking as possible.
Scientists don't understand even 1% per cent of the brain functionality. They can describe some phenomena (like point n shoot :P), they can poke it with a few chemicals but that's basically it.
What do you mean by understand? "Understanding how something works", and "what its fundamentals are", don't always overlap. But fundamentals are the serious mystery, while understanding the practice of something is just the application of developed theory (though it can be tremendously challenging).
Your argument to design is by lack of knowledge. Just because we don't know how something works, doesn't mean it was created by someone more intelligent. We're not
that intelligent anyway.
If you look at humans, how apparent their evolution is (their similarity to apes, the historical organs the have no functions, the genetic similarity [appendix, male nipples, hair, their shortened tail bone] you'll see how much of an instantaneous design we really are.
As for the boat, think of this. If you have infinite ropes and logs. You mix them repeatedly, and let the bad ones sink, till time ends. Don't you think some floating composition can assemble eventually?
Time is infinite, space and its resources are infinite, and we have heat (the random tossing). It would be really weird if nothing at all came out of it all!
mesa177
Humans have always been fascinated by big ideas like death, after-life, and the existence of God. These concepts have been pondered a lot, and still no consensus has been reached due to debates on the credibility of the evidences presented. When it comes to me, I have found the answers in the Quran and I'm convinced by them. Whatever works for you is fine, as long as it's your choice, no one can force a religious point of view upon you.
But I don't think arithma's post is religion-derived, it's rather the science behind life and human existence. When I first read the post, I thought "now there's an interesting point of view on human behavior". I've always been fascinated on how humans coexist and adapt to their surrounding. Consider a society where everyone looks alike, dresses alike, behave in the same manners, so there is no individuality. How do you think the people in that society would interact? What points of view could they possibly come up with to ponder and discuss? It's the diversity of people that makes us interact, not just a set of hormonal senses, chemical concoctions and a bunch of electrical signals emitted by our neural networks. We're interested in what makes us different, in how we behave under different conditions. There's this reality show called
"Solitary" where 8 people are placed in confinement (by choice), with no sense of time either, so they could test their mental and physical abilities beyond anything they've ever experienced. It is by far the best show I've watched in which I could see truly how humans behave under pressure, stress, and sheer determination. Those who won the three seasons were not strong candidates when it came to mental and physical abilities, but they had determination and highly adaptive skills that swung their way to victory. It was also enjoyable to see how far would the players treat each other especially that they don't know but a few details about the other players, and they refer to each other by numbers. Even with such minute details, animosities grew and friendships were built even when they didn't even interact with each other, only through Val, the computerized voice of the host. It was fascinating to see how some players overcame their fears and gag reflexes for the sake of just completing a game. Ironically, arithma's signature somewhat summarizes the attitudes of the players.
Point is, people can control their bodies just like the bodies control them: we can regulate our chemical balance and electrical signals to overcome fears, perceive the world around us, and live through the series of events that constitute life.
Besides, did you know that every human being is distinguished by even a minute genetic mutation which separates him/her from the rest of the human species? It can be something huge like Dean Karnazes' ability to keep on running forever or Bob Munden's ability to execute a 6-G force gun draw in a matter of milliseconds (didn't you just love Stan Lee's Superhumans on Discovery?), or something barely noticed like arithma's slight tendency to stretch his skin a couple of centimeters more than the rest of us :) I don't know why people look into space and whatnot to look for something interesting to ponder about while we sit here, all different and interesting to poke about :)
Metalloy
hey everyone :D
once I was very close to atheism, a lot of plausible arguments convinced me that God may only be creation of our profetts and savior or whatever to gain power and control their people, that religious books are bunch of stories and legends to control the mind of the people; thoughts that I am sure most of you had considered them before... what triggered those thoughts is mainly some "religeous ideas" that i simply cannot see as descending from the Almighty himself, ideas that I simply find too silly that should only be told for kids to scare nothing more! but then I stopped caring about those ideas and I did my own homework if you want to call it so:P I am a Muslim by the way so I am mostly talking from a muslim point of you: after reading the holy book of Qur'an, I found that a lot of these Ideas have no root in IT! or it has been very obviously interpreted! and When I read The Qur'an, I beleived more then ever; why? I don't know for sure but it just made sense to me, I just felt it:) so as a beleiver I do beleive in heaven and hell, in the afterlife; however I do not believe someone who start describing how's heaven like, what we can and we cant do, or all about the Day of the " Quiyema", because it is not fully desrcribed, hell it is barely described!
my post may be partially irrelevant to the subject but I want to share my experience this way to make sure that my point will be easier to comprehend:D
Joe
Hey everyone,
Allow me to start by thanking and congratulating each and everyone of you for having the first respectful "grown up" theological/existentialist discussion on a Lebanese online forum. If there is one thing I take away from this thread, it's the quality of the members Lebgeeks can produce.
I usually stay clear of "sensitive" subjects like this one, but out of respect for the quality of discussion here, I will share my view.
arithma's early post is very interesting. More than simply belief (or lack thereof) in God, it mentions some good points, which I agree with and I will expand on a bit.
We like to think that we have a purpose, that we will live forever, that somehow, there's a meaning to our presence, our ...
consciousness. arithma refutes it by depicting us as simple carbon machines, merely reacting (despite what Hollywood tells you, in a very predictable and accurate manner) to outside stimuli.
arithma is definitely not the first one to talk about this. Plato, some 2500 years ago, coined his famous "Cave allegory". For those of you not aware of it, the allegory underlines how dependent we, as human, are of our senses (scientifically coined as 5: hearing, sight, smell, taste and touch). That idea is so strongly encrusted in our social subconscious that we unsurprisingly come up with movies like "The Matrix".
"How different are we from computers?"
Studying a bit about psychology and neuro-linguistics, it is amazing how much the human brains resembles a machine. As mentioned before, our brains react (theoretically) predictably to outside stimuli (gathered through our senses). Those chemical reactions can be detected and as you know, a chemical reaction can only have one outcome. How is that any different from a machine that will consistently give you the same output for a given input?
Another way to look at it is this: "Machines are incapable of giving a random number". (Getting machines to produce random numbers have been the subject of studies for years. The best we got to is
faking it). Now if machines are unable of coming up with a truly random number, can human do? When I ask you for a random number, aren't you really reacting to your environment? How can someone like Derren Brown unmistakably know what "random" number you're about to chose?
Metalloy
@ rahmu:
discussion in the part: " how different are we from computers"?
well I don't agree that the brain is really predictable in the sense that you're describing: I mean, all computers will react the same way given that they are programmed the same way, our brains aren't; in critical situation, some of us will run for their lives, some of us will fight even at the risk of their own lives, some of us are brave today on cowards tomorrow...human brain is not that predictable, it is only predictable when facing basic stimuli: such as seeing and smelling food when hungry, at the brain will react and trigger the command to eat the food. Not the case in critical and complicated cases.
I don't know that Derren Fellow, but I wouldn't be so sure of his credibility if you're only depending on the media, however if you have a personal experience I would like of you to elaborate.:)
eurybaric
@Metalloy:
Consider this thought experiment: You are given a person's full input data, i.e his body chemistry, including memories, what he was taught in school, that day when his girlfriend broke up with him, and the rest. Now input something to that model: a specific sound let's say, at a specific moment, in a specific environment. Wont his output be predictable to you?
On the other hand, and it's more simple here: consider two computers with the same hardware and software installed. input the same thing in both, and you might get a different output. How? an unremarkable unnoticable file was corrupt on one for example. a registry key. a minor power fluctuation two years before that led to a minor difference in one of the computers. Now THAT is EASY to pinpoint when comparing to brains, but it does not make the principle any different.
In other words, what i'm saying is that brains might SEEM different than computers because of the vastness of data needed to model/predict them.
my two cents..
Joe
That makes sense. Kinda like, what is the difference between two exact same Mac Books? They have the same "base install", but as each one is used differently it becomes more "different". It has different data, a different history, different defects, different corruptions, different reactions... In a sense, two machines with a similar "base install" are differentiated by their "memory", their ability to retain marks from past singular events.
Humans don't all have the exact same "base install", we each carry a different genetic background that differentiate each one of us, but ultimately those differences aren't as important as we think. Just like a iMac, a Windows laptop, a linux embedded car system and a Solaris SPARC server are each very different, but aren't they really just a variation of the same architecture (the Von Neuman machine)?
In that aspect, I see identity of a person as the "base install" (genetic background) + "memories". That can explain the vast (and as mesa said, very interesting) differences between each human. However, that doesn't make us any less "machines".
Am I still making any sense? :-/
