I'm a Mystic, but I believe that any sufficiently advanced technology looks like magic, or mysticism, if you will.
|
|
| "Nothin' up my sleeve..." |
Posted on 02/21/2006 1:05:58 PM PST by bildabare
LOL!
Very good.
It all wraps around into a ball? Where's the ball? What contains it?
The way I look at it is-- what a sorry universe we would live in, if humans could figure it out. I can barely figure out popcorn.
A dilemna. We have no knowledge of energy transmission sites in the brain yet clinically dead people, if the Doc's study is to be believed, are describing events that occur when they are clinically dead.So how can this be? Well, one could explain auditory and tactile inputs by positing that we can't measure electrical activity in the brain at the levels it is happening during shutdown. But how does one explain the visuals? Dead people can't see through their eyelids and eyelids are closed when patients shutdown for a reason.
Is this science?
My default position is to be skeptical (the 'show me' attitude). People are often able to give quite detailed descriptions of events and circumstances based on purely auditory access to those events and circumstances. Plus I'd like to know how many of the near-death events took place in standard operating rooms (we all have a pretty good idea of what such places look like), and whether the patients were at any time able to see their surroundings, either before they flat-lined or after they were revived. One can well imagine that even brief glimpses of one's surroundings in such emotionally charged circumstances could make deep and lasting impressions. And so on...
But, of course, there's likely to always be a residual few cases that resist explanation, just as even today there are probably a few residual UFO cases that resist explanation. But anecdotal, odd-lot incidents are not the best foundation on which to erect a theory of consciousness and a theory of reality, it seems to me.
I could be mistaken, of course...
I'm a Mystic, but I believe that any sufficiently advanced technology looks like magic, or mysticism, if you will.
|
|
| "Nothin' up my sleeve..." |
A good answer.
What physical interaction mediates this transmission and reception? Where's the evidence for such an interaction? Where are the specific transmission and reception sites in the brain? Why haven't brain anatomists seen such sites?You are begging the question. If the soul exists, it would be, as traditionally stated, the substantial form of the body. He is not really proving immortality but existence "outside" the body. Apart from the body, the soul would "fade away" as dissolution takes place. This is Aristotle's view. Plato's view is that the soul is something that exists before the body takes shape and will survive it.
I don't think I was begging the question so much as attempting to elicit a response that had some hope of making sense from an empirical point of view. The brain is a physical object and if one claims that it's serving as some sort of receiver or transmitter of information, one ought to be able to say something meaningful about how that process takes place physically. If, as you suggest, reversion to a pre-scientific notion of 'soul' is the issue, none of this has anything to do with medicine or science at all, and so the fact that it is a medical doctor who is making the claim is irrelevant—he is not making the claim qua physician.
The radio model of the brain has much to recommend it. This was suggested by Cayce and his feeling that he read an akashic record that would be available to anyone. There is a gap where we don't know and probably can't know, how thought, will, actuates the efferent nerves, or if it does. Most have not figured out there is a problem here, but until a decent explanation comes forth, the various models of the brain, including the popular computer model, all have about as much explanatory value.
It reminds me of a verse from the Bible--
The unspiritual man does not receive the gifts of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual man judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one. "For who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct Him?" BUT WE HAVE THE MIND OF CHRIST. (1 Corinthians 2:14-16 RSV)
Fascinating stuff
Someone once mentioned that psychics are studied by scholars, but scholars are not studied by psychics. I don't know if that is true or if it means anything, but who knows it might be useful sometime.
Thus, the organ donation program is a sham and is killing people via disection to harvest hearts and other body parts.
LOLOL! Thanks for the heads up!
That's good (Rocky & Bullwinkle). I was thinking of the movie "The Gods Must Be Crazy", where the natives start worshipping a coke bottle. But my point is that we kid ourselves if we think we're so advanced that there aren't things we haven't seen, or technologies we can't detect. I think all of God's creation can be scientifically explained, but we are infinitely far (still) from being capable of doing it.
Perhaps science is outside its jurisdiction with certain everyday pre scientific phenomena, like our consciousness or creativity. Science can't determine this yet, if it can at all.
I tend to think not. The scientific method is still a baby. Who knows what it will have deciphered a few centuries hence?
...if science does come from the id, do you think that there may be many sciences for different cultures, as there has been a variety of science (Ptolemaic, Newtonian, etc.) for ours?
It's fashionable in some quarters to argue that, say, electrons are 'social constructions', so if some society chooses not to construct electrons it just means that they have a different kind of science and world-view, no worse than our own.
This is arrant nonsense. It troops together with the view that the world view of radical islam is no worse than the world view of democratic pluralism. The inability to judge claims of truth bleeds over (sometimes literally!) into the inability to judge claims of value.
We should resist this post-modernist pestilence.
(Nice to hear from you Blind Eye. I hope your music-making goes well...)
I was poking a bit of gentle fun...glad you took it that way.
If people think electrons are social constructions, I beg them to put their finger in a power outlet.
Yup.
There's a school of thought that says why worry about weighty theological matters... we'll find out soon enough. Also that theology teaches you everything about religion you'll ever need to know except the most important part.
"the credit card people would have discovered it by now"
Sheesh, what a horrible thought.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
