Is man even a spiritual being?

[Mark A. Baker]

Then you can't prove any so-called metaphysical beliefs that you are supporting. ...

Beyond an interest in the study of the philosophy of metaphysics, and one which I readily confess,

I haven't advocated any particular 'metaphysical beliefs'.​

What I think is happening is that you and some others have an existing 'm/u' on the word metaphysics. The mere presence of the word apparently acts as some sort of a red flag producing an automatic attack response.

Look it up. The common meaning of the word is NOT the same as the original meaning. The word actually derives from greek philosophy and relates to a specific branch of traditional philosophy dealing with questions relating to 'first causes', 'universals', or alternately 'the nature of reality' considered in the broadest possible sense. Metaphysics as a branch of philosophy includes such considerations as 'thinking about the nature of thought' and as such may draw attention to the assumptions which underly specific areas of human knowledge, e.g. the physical sciences. It's an interesting traditional area of philosophical study, and in many ways essential for understanding the limits of human reason.

http://www.rep.routledge.com/article/N095

However, in common parlance 'metaphysical' is often used to describe objects or things which an individual may believe to exist yet which have no apparent physical basis of existence. The latter popular usage is derative from the earlier philosophical context, however, it marks a 'laziness of usage' and typically reflects an inadequate consideration of the details of metaphysical analysis.

Words often have multiple meanings, be clear how a word is being used. That is what 'word clearing' tech specifically and 'clearing misunderstoods' more generally is about. What I've written so far has been clear enough, as evidenced by the ability of other respondents on the thread to understand and respond intelligently. Any misconception lies in the failure to apply a correct meaning to my words.



I'm not in general an advocate of 'beliefs'. I don't hold that it is necessary to have or hold to a 'belief'. I'm fairly selective about that which I choose to believe or assert as a belief. Roger has already commented in some fashion about this personal trait of mine. I'm personally quite comfortable with [COLOR="#blue"]not knowing[/COLOR] the answers to a question which I regard as apparently currently beyond the ability to ascertain a definitive and accurate answer.

I see it as far more important to actually understand the nature of a question rather than to have at hand an answer to any possible question. Understanding is a process of knowing which entails having facility with the relationships which exist among a body of ideas. It is not an archiving of facts. I do like answers, but I learned long ago that it is far more important to actually understand the questions. That isn't always so easy.

The ready adoption and adherence to beliefs is most frequently achieved by disregarding the actual scope & complexity of the questions at hand.

All such assertions of 'my beliefs' heretofore suggested have been 'dub-in' on the part of those seeking to 'pick a fight' with me over their own pet beliefs. I see it as pointless, tiresome, and an obvious attempt at 'strawman' reasoning. It also reflects a clearly limited understanding of the questions discussed.

... Yet you've now come back the next day and lied about having said such. ...

I have not lied at all, but you have clearly demonstrated your own ignorance & rigid intellectual bias in remarks based solely on your inability to comprehend what has been written.

Adios, amigo. In light of your deliberately insulting behavior you are not worth further response on the matter.


Mark A. Baker

 

[Mystic]

 

[Ted]

Maybe we should start with a shorter, simpler question: Is man?

 

[Mystic]

Is is?

 

[SweetnessandLight]

....

 

[Mystic]

....

Oh my, she did it!!!!


....


Now I can go to another thread.

 

[Francois Tremblay]

Actually, man is a meat puppet. This may seem extremely unpalatable for most of you, but given the current research into the brain and decision-making, this seems to be the truth.

 

[apocalyptic]

Is is?

Let us keep Bill Clinton out of this matter ok? Lol.

Someone said: (maybe Ted) Maybe we should start with a shorter, simpler question: Is man?

And what Scientologists by and large seem to misunderstand, is this fundamental question.

Is man?

The underlying notion is that what man is, by definition, according to Hubbard, doesn't actually exist. Which is to say man is a definition of the consequence of the particular mental/emotional persuasions of a reactive mind. Whereas in fact what (and where) a man appears to be, is in reality the presence of a thetan. (think satan with a lisp). lol.

Apoc

 

[apocalyptic]

Actually, man is a meat puppet. This may seem extremely unpalatable for most of you, but given the current research into the brain and decision-making, this seems to be the truth.

Fair enough. Not so long ago the earth was flat according to the current research.

Check back in 10,000 years from now and you (along with us) will laugh at the audacity of your present (and passing) commentary.

Lol.

Apoc

 

[apocalyptic]

The ready adoption and adherence to beliefs is most frequently achieved by disregarding the actual scope & complexity of the questions at hand.

Mark A. Baker

On a scale of 1 to 100, we are giving your (select) prose above, a 99. Which is a rare feat indeed.

Lol.

Apoc.

 

[Mystic]

Actually, man is a meat puppet. This may seem extremely unpalatable for most of you, but given the current research into the brain and decision-making, this seems to be the truth.

Research? By whom, or what? Monkeys can do better "research".

 

[programmer_guy]

Research? By whom, or what? Monkeys can do better "research".

It's pretty clear and modern brain research is moving in that direction.

I know that this seems to be an ugly thought but it really isn't.

 

[RolandRB]

I'm happy knowing I am a meat puppet. It makes me feel like I want to be a "good" meat puppet by being nice to other meat puppets. We meat puppets need to stick together.

All your "past life" memories are nonsense, BTW. Hubbard was a con man and a liar. Just sayin'

 

[RolandRB]

And once we realise that we are meat puppets then you have a clearer idea on what it means to do good in the world. To me that means I should work for a pharmaceutical company making drugs that improve and extend lives and that is what I do.

 

[RogerB]

Thanks Rog. I understand the intuition here. Let me suggest some things you may not be considering.

It clearly is the case that spiritual phenomena have remained unobserved by science. The question is why. You propose what I think is a very intuitive answer: spiritual phenomena are perceptible to and have an influence over our mental states, which do not in-turn effect our brain states (since that would remove spiritual phenomena to the domain of scientifically observable phenomena). This view hinges, I think, on the existence of mental states which do not have physically corresponding brain states (at the very least, the mental state of realizing a particular spiritual state).

This would have to be a very special class of mental states, since so far every mental state we've attempted to track has a brain state correlate (to the degree that future mental states can be accurately predicted based only on initial brain states).

It would also have to be a special class of memory encoding. Everything we know about memory indicates it is encoded in the brain. Granted, the way it's encoded isn't intuitive like, say, the way a hard drive encodes onto a disk, but it IS encoded. (As it turns out, the brain distributes memory across the synaptic weights of a large population of neurons).

I think that both of these special classes of mental phenomena would be observable to science, at least in the mundane sense that there would be large gaps of unaccountable mental phenomena (special spiritual states and special spiritual memory) in our understanding, and that there would be a regularity to those gaps.

As it turns out, there are gaps in our understanding (neuroscience and cognitive psyche are both new fields), although it's too early to tell if those gaps are temporary or if they necessarily obtain because of some ontological independence or a linguistic anti-reductionism (and it's important to the intuitive, spiritual view that it be ontological independence -- truly independent stuff happening -- as opposed to non-independent stuff for which our physicalist language is ill-equipped to describe).

However, as far as I know (and I'm not touting myself as some kind of expert here), the regularities around the gaps in our understanding are not consistent with spiritual regularities. Neuroscience has investigated folks under fMRI having spiritual and non-spiritual experiences (to be fair, 'religious experiences' is what was looked at) and we're beginning to learn just what is happening inside someone's skull under those circumstances.

More importantly, a very good model of mental activity is beginning to emerge from our efforts across several domains, including neuroscience and AI, one which precludes special classes of memory encoding and special classes of 'brain-less' mental states.

The emerging view conceives of the brain as a system of interconnected layers of feature discriminators (many of which can perform their function even without the presence of features to discriminate). The 'conceptual space', the 'mind space', is embodied in the high-dimensional weighting architecture connecting populations of these nodes. The brain represents the world, or some aspect of it, by means of a high-dimensional activation vector across the nodes of one of these layers, and projects that vector through a matrix to another non-linear population of nodes (with the coefficient of the matrix being the synaptic weights connecting the two layers).

Such a system undergoes a training period to calibrate the weight space to particular problems, but once calibrated the system solves new and never-before-seen problems by generalizing problems from the training set. It projects inputs through the 'weight space' to pair them with behavior outputs.

This view (which is, basically, the neural network model) is very amenable to the empirical observations we make in the brain, as well as the reported observations folks make about their subjective states. It unifies several bodies of research that pre-date it, offers the promise of explanatory and predictive success over its competitors, and doesn't require special metaphysical conceits to get off the ground. It is, in fact, the result of considering only logically-implied phenomena, so unfortunately it's deflationary to 'spiritual' notions.

On the plus side, models built according to this view demonstrate many of the same capacities that humans do with regards to problem solving, abstract generalization and reasoning, and even cognitive biases. We haven't made one which is self-aware yet, of course (because that kind of complexity would require several billion connections), but in principle it's looking increasing possible (much more possible than the old days of symbol-processor Turing Machines).

I'm not sure how dissuasive any of this is for you in terms of spirituality . I simply wanted to let you know how much we do know about the brain and the ways in which it is entangled with the mind, since your view is predicated on certain brain/mind unknowns.

(OK 3 posts in a row. I yield the floor!)

B-D,

The above is a long and rationally argued position, and I see it is based on current physical sciences/medicine based perception and obtained data.

I'll not get into a point by point dealing with each little issue . . . I'm not into that nor do I have the time.

But to point our where we differ in our perception and basis of our view, I would cite the paragraph highlighted in red above.

Particularly this part:

spiritual phenomena are perceptible to and have an influence over our mental states, which do not in-turn effect our brain states

This in my view blows the accuracy of the view you are expressing . . . .

First of all, spiritual phenomena are not "perceptible" to the mind . . . the "mind" does not do the perceiving. It is the other way around. Though all those whose view on the subject is based on physical phenomena believe as you state. But they fail to correctly, or at all, define what the "mind" is . . . they too often jumble it up with "brain" . . . and they assert the brain cum mind does the perceiving.

For those who do spiritual exercises and knowingly exercise their spiritual perception, they know differently.

The spirit does affect the mind and mental states . . . that we agree on . . . but we differ on whether the spirit whether directly or via influence of the "mental state" can and/or does affect or influence the brain.

We who knowingly operate as spiritual Beings know that we affect the brain by our action. It is we, as spiritual Beings, that induce (emanate) the energy that sets the cascade of reactions going in the brain.

Research the MRI brain scans done on Buddhist monks in conjunction with the Dalai Lama . . . they show conclusively the effect the spirit can have on the mind/brain . . . though to be honest I have a very different view of what the mind is and how it came into being than is proffered by most commentators on this subject.

The rest is too long and convoluted to get into for me this morning.

But to view one rather good and brilliant scientist's view on it all, and he's coming from a medical/biologist perspective. I recommend Dr. Bruce Lipton Ph.D. here: http://www.brucelipton.com/

He may well either change your views on all this or otherwise, at least, give you great food for thought.

He did his original work as one of the professors at an up-scale university . . . . he's not one of those "I've got a PhD so let me talk" types. He spend years in practice and in the lab.

Rog

 

[RogerB]

At the risk of offending . . . but I know you good souls here on ESMB will take this in the jockular spirit it is intended (some I don't know about, though )

This cartoon reminds me of some of the conversation on this thread and elsewhere on ESMB

But, we'll see . . . .

 

[Commander Birdsong]

And once we realise that we are meat puppets then you have a clearer idea on what it means to do good in the world. To me that means I should work for a pharmaceutical company making drugs that improve and extend lives and that is what I do.

as with other philosophers, i don't see how "good" has meaning if we are meat puppets. the recent austrian auslander's program's make as much sense as anything else if we are but meat puppets

 

[RolandRB]

as with other philosophers, i don't see how "good" has meaning if we are meat puppets. the recent austrian auslander's program's make as much sense as anything else if we are but meat puppets

Meat puppets can be nice to each other. Meat puppets can help each other. No religion involved - just "do as you would be done by".

 

[uniquemand]

as with other philosophers, i don't see how "good" has meaning if we are meat puppets. the recent austrian auslander's program's make as much sense as anything else if we are but meat puppets

Good only has meaning to people based on how it affects them in terms of their goals, their physical well-being/pleasure, and the systems of thought they have identified with. Things that threaten these are "evil". Things that bolster them are "good", and things that don't are "neutral".

Rape is considered evil by most cultures. Why? I would contend that it violates the will of the person who is raped. I think this is the most universal we can get, in terms of evil: violation of the will of another. We do justify certain forms of this (imprisonment, arrest, etc.), where a person's will is interfered with, but typically because collectively we have a will, as well, and an individual's rights seem to come second to the will of the collective.

YOU WILL BE ASSIMILATED!

 

[Mystic]

Does habanero sauce enhance the flavor of BBQed meat puppet?