A question of spirits/souls

angelica wrote:

Ahnimus, in this forum, all views are welcome--personal, philosophical, religious, etc. I have no interest to interrupt your personal model of the universe and "prove" anything to you. I respect your subjective view, how your mind operates, and how that is about who you are--it is what it is. You are certainly entitled to your perspective.

I'm supporting what Byrnzie said regarding physicists coming to see the unity and the parallels with certain spiritual/shamanistic or Eastern views, I'm sharing the perspectives of some physicists who are prominent in the field, with indepth science backgrounds, and who also philosophize about consciousness, spirit and quantum physics.

You present one view; I am presenting yet another. I understand you want your view to rule because you believe it is the one true view. And still, the views of these educated quantum physicists and neurosurgeon stand, until proven otherwise. All theories that extend beyond the limited frame of specific experimental investigation are on par with one another.

In other words, while you personally tend towards reducing human beings and their diverse, and often amazing experiences, there are untold experts in science, philosophy, and from all walks of life, that accept and revere the mysterious and all kinds of experience beyond what we can yet reduce and "prove".

angelica wrote:

David Bohm and Fred Alan Wolf have both stated that there is Supreme Intelligence and God, etc. in their opinions, based on the facts as they know them. This is quoted in these posts. They are both physicists. It's looks like Byrnzie is correct that physicists are declaring this, given these men have declared this, based on their professional understanding of quantum physics. And there are many more, too!


One who philosophizes is a philosopher. Also, maybe you realize that Byrnzie has a philosophy degree!

Just because someone's idea of what is true, and their means of deciding that, is different from your own it is merely different. I understand your own cognitive dissonance want to assure you that you are accurate and others are false. And yet there remains much dissent amongst philosophical views. Take Aristotle and Plato. Differences are allowed.

Your lack of awareness on how others are coming to their theories and conclusions is about your own lack of awareness. For you to project that lack onto others, and assume they have no reputable, valid process is futile.

I know, I know...I've been saying all along that you are only going to hear what resonates with what you believe. I don't expect you to accept what to others is perfectly reasonble in the points of view I have shared from these esteemed individuals. However, I know others do appreciate the reasoning and beauty in such models and I fully support that.

The men quoted by me here are highly trained scientists. They all have taught at highly esteemed instititutions of higher learning. They've proven their ability time and again. Considering they are all finely trained in scientific process, fact and so on, and understand the high standards of academic learning and knowledge speaks volumes for these individuals, and the many more highly educated and valued free thinkers like them.


Tell that to these esteemed scientists and their colleagues who support them.

For example, tell the numerous interpretations of quantum physics and, say, complementarity that.... The problem here is that you are assuming models ARE the truth. And rather they represent what we know about the truth now, given the context of the model. They never ever encompass the whole truth when reducing truth to science or even philosophy. Ever.

wikipedia wrote:

Philosophy is the discipline concerned with questions of how one should live (ethics); what sorts of things exist and what are their essential natures (metaphysics); what counts as genuine knowledge (epistemology); and what are the correct principles of reasoning (logic).[1] [2] The word itself is of Greek origin: φιλοσοφία (philosophía), a compound of φίλος (phílos: friend, or lover) and σοφία (sophía: wisdom).[3][4]

Though no single definition of philosophy is uncontroversial, and the field has historically expanded and changed depending upon what kinds of questions were interesting or relevant in a given era, it is generally agreed that philosophy is a method, rather than a set of claims, propositions, or theories. Its investigations are based upon rational thinking, striving to make no unexamined assumptions and no leaps based on faith or pure analogy. Different philosophers have had varied ideas about the nature of reason, and there is also disagreement about the subject matter of philosophy. Some think that philosophy examines the process of inquiry itself. Others, that there are essentially philosophical propositions which it is the task of philosophy to prove.[5]

OutOfBreath wrote:

I am not writing a defense of these theories, I am criticizing your rather one-sided view. Not agreeing with you does not place me at the opposite end.

As for reductionism, it would also depend on what exactly it is you are reducing. The TV example you mentioned isn't very good, as humans made the tv from the parts, hence making it self-evident that knowing the parts will know the whole. Wholes that we didn't make from the outset are much harder to reduce, as we are more at a loss as to why it works in the first place. Science does then often make approximations after prolonged development on those issues, but are never in a position to claim full knowledge. Which is why you will see all the disclaimers your scientists often have. I feel you try to reduce way more than you really can with your theories and references, and as I often note, your references dont draw the conclusions you do quite often.

There is a larger burden of proof to be able to claim all (relevant) knowledge, than to claim that everything is not known or that we may not know the full picture. Reductionism, useful a tool as it is, may never be able to prove anything outside its limited boundaries, although we can use it to great effect within those.

Peace
Dan

angelica wrote:

Again, you and I disagree--we see things differently. I, like Byrnzie, see that when physicists are declaring "spirit" based on physics, well, then physicists are declaring spirit. I get that you disagree.


I guess you'll have to take that up with wikipedia...let me know how that turns out....

"David Joseph Bohm (b. December 20, 1917, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania - d. October 27, 1992, London) was an American-born quantum physicist, who made significant contributions in the fields of theoretical physics, philosophy and neuropsychology, and to the Manhattan Project....

Bridging science, philosophy, and cognition:

Bohm's scientific and philosophical views seemed inseparable. In 1959, his wife Saral recommended to him a book by the Indian philosopher J. Krishnamurti that she had seen in a library. He found himself impressed by the way his own ideas on quantum mechanics meshed with the philosophical ideas of Krishnamurti. Bohm's approach to philosophy and physics receive expression in his 1980 book Wholeness and the Implicate Order, and in his 1987 book Science, Order and Creativity. Bohm and Krishnamurti went on to become close friends for over 25 years, with a deep mutual interest in philosophy and the state of humanity."
~ wikipedia

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy wrote:

Each of the examples discussed in this overview has both promising and problematic aspects. The approach by Beck and Eccles is most detailed and concrete with respect to the application of standard quantum mechanics to the process of exocytosis. However, it does not solve the problem of how the activity of single synapses enters the dynamics of neural assemblies, and it leaves mental causation of quantum processes as a mere claim. Stapp's approach suggests a radically expanded ontological basis for both the mental domain and status-quo quantum theory as a theory of matter without essentially changing the formalism of quantum theory. Although related to inspiring philosophical and some psychological background, it still lacks empirical confirmation. The proposal by Penrose and Hameroff exceeds the domain of present-day quantum theory by far and is the most speculative example among those discussed. It is not easy to see how the picture as a whole can be formally worked out and put to empirical test.

The approach initiated by Umezawa is embedded in the framework of quantum field theory, more broadly applicable and formally more sophisticated than standard quantum mechanics. It refers directly to the activity of neuronal assemblies as the neural correlates of mental representations. A clear conceptual distinction between brain states and mental states is most often missing, although the approach is not intended to be reductionistic. Vitiello's more recent accounts offer some clarifying hints in that direction, which point to an understanding in terms of a dual-aspect approach. Other such approaches, like those of Pauli and Jung and of Bohm and Hiley, are conceptually more transparent in this respect. On the other hand, they are essentially unsatisfactory with regard to a sound formal basis and concrete empirical scenarios. A novel dual-aspect quantum proposal by Primas, based on the distinction between tensed mental time and tenseless physical time, marks a significant step forward, particularly as concerns a consistent formal framework.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-consciousness/