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Nosso lar 
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Post Re: Nosso lar
Eben's basic claim is that his rich experience could not be due to brain activity, therefore it had to be something real existing outside the brain. The premise that there was no brain activity is obviously faulty. I even picked up on that in my first comment about the video. With a faulty premise, the deduction that follows is unlikely to be a good one. And that's where con-artists ply their trade.

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Wed Jul 03, 2013 3:58 am
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The con artist goes both ways. The atheist scientist will claim the slightest of activity could cause internal hallucinations. Thats really balanced. Can you operate with a fraction of your heart going? Both sides are working from faulty premises. Who knows where consciousness lies.

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Wed Jul 03, 2013 5:18 am
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The creepy online archive of Texas death row inmates' final words.
Source


Death Row Texas last confessions.
Source

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Wed Jul 03, 2013 2:01 pm
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magamud wrote:
Can you operate with a fraction of your heart going?

That's a poor analogy, as hearts and minds are not analogous. But I agree that con-artists can operate anywhere, but there usually has to be a payoff, like money, power, or control. What is the payoff for nonbelievers pursuing truth?

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Thu Jul 04, 2013 4:24 am
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ITs not a poor analogy. Its a major organ. Its common sense. The payoff to be bias and closed minded is to keep your position safe and secure.

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Thu Jul 04, 2013 5:28 am
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magamud wrote:
ITs not a poor analogy.

The heart is a mission critical organ, a single point of failure. Put a hole in it and the body dies. The brain can suffer lots of holes and the body doesn't die. Alzheimers comes to mind, or Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease. Or even frontal lobotomies. Try cutting a lobe off the heart!

magamud wrote:
The payoff to be bias and closed minded is to keep your position safe and secure.

I agree. But I've already argued strongly for the utility of uncertainty, which is not consistent with a safe and secure position. I am willing to change my position very quickly with appropriate evidence, because I am only committed to my position based on the evidence available to me. It would make no sense to do otherwise (like changing positions for no reason). Although objective Truth is stable (or is it), subjective truth (the only truth humans can know) is a moving target, because it is rooted in the subject. That means we have to be "movable", if we are really interested in truth. In that environment, a safe and secure position has to viewed with some suspicion, but should not be abandoned for trivial reasons. So once again, it is a question of balance.

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Thu Jul 04, 2013 6:28 am
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The question of religion and the question of purpose are closely coupled in the human mind. This is an unfortunate side-effect of the capabilities of the human mind, which is dismal at best. Still we need something to talk about. :lol:

I've been having a private debate with Andy, and I have his permission to share it with you all. Andy has accused me of being a Richard Dawkins worshipper. Andy is aware of my admiration for the work of Richard Dawkins laid out in his many books, all of which I have read with great enjoyment and discovery, except for his two latest books, which I have not yet read. Andy has a bad feeling about Dawkins, and has not read any of his books. I think this might be akin to people who have a bad feeling about spiders or snakes, but don't really know much about them. The feeling is real enough, and both snakes and spiders can be venomous and thus harmful, but a little knowledge can go a long way, for both types of creatures do significant good on this planet. Nevertheless, Andy is a clever git and should not be dismissed, so it may be wise to explore his accusation and see if it has some merit.

As part of his onslaught, Andy presented me with four video clips today (1 2 3 4). I watched them all, and I am posting my comments on each one here, before discussing the videos with Andy.

=====

Video #1: The criticism is that Dawkins chooses who he debates. And why not. Dawkins has been there and done that. He has plenty of experience debating religious believers, and he knows there is really little point in arguing with them. Who appointed Dawkins the champion of atheists, anyway, and requires him to do battle with every religious challenger?

Video #2: "If God exists, the universe has a purpose, and if God does not exist, the universe does not have a purpose." So says Craig, but this is oversimplified, binary thinking. I can see why Dawkins wants to stay away from these people.

The other two possibilities of this binary mode of thinking have been ignored. If God exists, the universe has no purpose. Is that outside the realm of possibility? Perhaps God is insane. And if God does not exist, the universe has a purpose. And why not? Perhaps the purpose of the universe is to exist and maintain its existence. It should be obvious by now that the purpose of the universe is independent of the idea that God exists. There is no necessary connection between the two ideas.

Video #3: "All pray to Richard Dawkins because he is a God-like figure." You can guess from the opening line that this is a hit-piece against Dawkins, and sure enough, it is.

The claim is that Dawkins believes that anyone who thinks differently from him is irrational. This too is gross oversimplification. Dawkins does have a bias against religion as being irrational, because that's what the preponderance of evidence has led him to conclude. He does not want to waste time re-examining that evidence over and over again just because a new religious debater wants to take him on. I can understand that.

Video #4: Hedges accuses atheists of "religious" fervor, and creating their own religion out of "anti-religion". They are as bad as the Christian right, Hedges claims! It's a matter of what they believe, and they are illiterate in too many areas, Hedges suggests. They act just like religious fundamentalists, believing that if others won't be converted, they must be annihilated. In other words, atheists are no different than the religious faithful.

This is the fancy version of "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

Atheists do argue that religion is an impediment to human progress. And indeed, there is good evidence for this. The problem is really one of human nature, argues Hedges. I agree, but this statement from Hedges is an oversimplification. We know that sociopaths exist, and their human nature is different from the norm. The worst of human nature leads us (i.e. sociopaths lacking empathy), and the best of human nature does not.

Hedges correctly argues that religion is like art, dealing with non-measurable, philosophical issues. It is true that there is a component of religion that meets this definition, but most of religion as it is practiced does not. Hedges also correctly recognizes that morality is independent of religious belief, and independent of non-religious belief. "When you divide people into moral planes, that becomes very dangerous." That is true, but it must also be recognized that people are distributed on a moral sliding scale, with sociopaths at one end and saints at the other. Ignoring that distribution is also dangerous, for that is what we are doing now by allowing sociopaths to lead us.

=====

Defending the ideas of Dawkins can be misconstrued as Dawkins worship. I defend those ideas based on their merit, not on their messenger. Hedges also has some good ideas that I would defend, like science being ill-equipped to investigate the unmeasurables like love and beauty. Even Rupert Sheldrake has some good ideas that I would defend, like the errors science commits in its basic assumptions. I think Hedges would agree with me if I point out that science doesn't really make those assumptions -- humans claiming to be practicing science make those assumptions. There's an important distinction there, that being that humans often fail to practice science as it is designed to be practiced. Could we not say the same for religion? It's almost as if humans ruin everything. :lol:

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Thu Oct 10, 2013 5:48 am
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As part of his criticism directed at Richard Dawkins, Andy sent me this article. In it, Victor Zammit criticizes Richard Dawkins for his blanket dismissal of the paranormal. Near the end, Zammit sums it up in one sentence:

Quote:
Dawkins, scoffers and debunkers have to learn how to discriminate between the quacks and the charlatans who are not psychic but claim to be from the admittedly much rarer genuine and legitimate ones.

It's Catch-22.

If quacks and charlatans make up the bulk of psychic performers, Dawkins has a good deal of legitimacy in dismissing a good deal of alleged paranormal activity. But if only one example of paranormal activity can be demonstrated to be genuine, Dawkins' blanket dismissal cannot stand. The biggest roadblock to this is determining the criteria for verifying genuine paranormal activity. By definition, paranormal phenomena lie outside the normal experience of humans. What tools do we have to measure this world of the bizarre and mysterious? Almost none. It is a Catch-22 conundrum.

Question everything, dismiss nothing. Dawkins dismisses the paranormal. He also dismisses creationism, intelligent design, and God. In the search for truth, it seems natural to dismiss what is apparently not true. This is what scientists often do, after all. In fact, almost everyone does it! How can we find a needle in a haystack (where the needle represents truth) if we do not discard each strand of hay that is not a needle? It seems necessary to do some discarding, based on our existing bias of how to find the needle.

But wait -- perhaps we need to think outside the box, or outside of our natural accumulation of biases. For example, a strong electromagnet could pull that needle out of the haystack in short order. But to think of that solution requires a certain level of understanding the nature of the universe. And that too is a Catch-22, because the search for the needle is indeed the search for a certain level of understanding the nature of the universe.

It's not simple, and human brains do not handle complexity very well, which is why we tend to oversimplify. No wonder we argue so passionately about who is right and who is wrong.

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Sat Oct 12, 2013 7:25 am
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Post Re: Nosso lar
This might seem a little off topic, but posted this as a lead to Prof Robert lanza's views on the afterlife.



Is there an afterlife? The science of biocentrism can prove there is, claims Professor Robert Lanza

It’s a question pondered by philosophers, scientists and the devout since the dawn of time: is there an afterlife?

While the religious would argue that life on earth is a mere warm up for an eternity spent in heaven or hell, and many scientists would dismiss the concept for lack of proof – one expert claims he has definitive evidence to confirm once and for all that there is indeed life after death.

The answer, Professor Robert Lanza says, lies in quantum physics – specifically the theory of biocentrism. The scientist, from Wake Forest University School of Medicine in North Carolina, says the evidence lies in the idea that the concept of death is a mere figment of our consciousness.

Professor Lanza says biocentrism explains that the universe only exists because of an individual’s consciousness of it – essentially life and biology are central to reality, which in turn creates the universe; the universe itself does not create life. The same applies to the concepts of space and time, which Professor Lanza describes as “simply tools of the mind”.


Read more...




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Sun Nov 17, 2013 2:13 am
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Why is it that we have to be told that Robert Lanza is one of the most respected scientists in the world? Is it so we will give him the benefit of the doubt, or so we will suspend our established convictions?

So biocentrism says our biology creates our own personal Matrix, which we perceive as reality. I have to wonder why we need our senses in that case, for if everything occurs within our heads, why do we need to interface with the outside world, which we supposedly are creating in the first place?

The bigger question is: Is experience reality? Do we really create reality, or do we simply experience a mental virtualization of reality?

And with this we are going to prove there is life after death? This I gotta see.... :lol:

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Sun Nov 17, 2013 6:52 am
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