Posted on 09/20/2013 4:29:03 AM PDT by spirited irish
Ha ha! I knew you're a phony.
You’re an airhead.
Face it, nothing you say about the Bible or family values has any credibility.
Lo and behold! The Pastrix preaches her sermon.
I was looking for your creds, couldn’t find anything but bowel gas. Could you show us where to find them?
Oh so very true, dearest sister in Christ!
You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear....
Thank you so very much for your spot-on observations!
Indeed it not only can be said, but actually has been said that man has no soul/spirit because such entities have no physical realization — famously by Daniel Dennett. I gather his buddy Dawkins agrees. You'll recall that these two launched a transAtlantic "Brights vs. Dims" rhetorical campaign, the purpose of which was to put theists in the "Dims" category, whereupon they were set up as objects of scorn and derision.
Yet this allegation makes me think that the alleger has undergone some sort of strange self-lobotomy...which would be an exercise in self-reduction. (Indeed, I would argue, an exercise in self-mutilation.)
You, dear sister in Christ, consistently focus on the cosmic implications of the attempt to expunge the transcendent or spiritual aspects of Reality from the cosmic record, cosmic history.
I think we agree that Man cannot be the measure of such, such to say what is admissible and thus "good," and what is inadmissible and thus "trash." Only a self-lobotomized, narcissistic personality can believe he is the logos of Reality. Which, in essence, is what your typical gnostic thinker believes, when you boil it all down. Such a thinker ends up being a "god unto himself." The great Hegel — father of "dialectical science" — is a major case in point.
Which from a scientific standpoint, is really hilarious. Science ever tries to banish all "subjective elements" from its practice. (A thing increasingly difficult to do, post Einsteinian Relativity and Copenhagen School quantum mechanics, wherein the observer — a relentlessly subjective mind — is methodologically indispensable.)
At least since Schrödinger's landmark essay "What is Life?" (1944), there has been a growing awareness in physics that any "new physics" will depend on a greater understanding of biology. And increasingly it is recognized that biology is not a simple study of biological parts which can then be summed up as a complete description of the Whole of which they are parts.
Increasingly the realization is that what makes a biological organism per se alive is not the mere sum of its parts, but the organizational scheme by which the multifarious parts are coordinated into a single, persistent, living being over time. The organizational scheme is not a material or physical thing. But without it, there are no living beings.
Here's a little something on-point from Robert Rosen's Essays on Life Itself (2000):
...the destructive experiments [e.g., "fractionating wholes" to yield their "parts" for study, on the presupposition that if you know everything about the "parts," then just tot up all that knowledge, and you will "recover" your Whole with no loss of information] on which reductionisms depend are inherently irreversible, in any material sense, yet the effect of these presumed transformations is precisely to reverse them, to go backward from a big population of elementary units to a particular material system (e.g., an organism) of which they are an isomer.Must leave it there for now. Thank you, dear sister in Christ, for your outstanding observations on our present questions!
Many years ago, I heard a routine of Woody Allen that bears on exactly this point. As he told it, he acquired a Rolls-Royce while in England and wanted to return with it to the States. On the other hand, he didn't want to pay the duty on it. So he hit on the idea of disassembling it, packing the parts into many suitcases, and describing them to the customs inspectors as modern sculpture, not dutiable as art. He was successful, got his many suitcases home, and proceeded to try to assemble his car. In his first attempt, the parts yielded 200 bicycles. On the second attempt, he got many lawn-mowers. And so it went; he never could retrieve the car.
What do you call the counterpoint to reducionism that expands every question to a quagmire of metaphysical navel-gazing that produces answers that cannot be conveyed?
What I object to is reductionism in principle. Logic can work in a "reduced" system. But to the extent the system is reduced, the applications of logic must be reduced to the size of that system. Logic all by itself will not propose questions outside its specifically directed application.
And system "sizes" are determined according to the way in which they are defined and modeled. If all your modeling is conducted on the presupposition that the only thing that ultimately exists, is "matter in its motions," then you necessarily have an extremely reduced model of the natural world. Logic can still work there; but it can never give you the "whole story."
Perhaps the most important part of the "whole story" that is edited out in this process is what Einstein called "'free creations of the human mind,' on which he believed science depends." [Rosen, ibid.]
Heck, on the widely-accepted materialist/mechanistic models, the human mind itself must be held suspect as something that really is a fiction (since we can't "observe" it). And yet science depends on it; for without mind, science cannot do its work.
Do you not see the inherent logical self-contradition at work here?
BAD SCIENCE.
What do you call the counterpoint to reducionism that expands every question to a quagmire of metaphysical navel-gazing that produces answers that cannot be conveyed?
ans; BULL Sweating..
Yes but I don't see any solution being offered. Reductionism eliminates information that cannot be conveyed. You protest that this is too limiting, but can't explain how to make it work without it.
In a perfect world we wouldn't have the physical limitations we do. But it is what it is, and our choices are to do it the best we can within the limitations we have to live and work with, or not do it at all.
I choose the former.
betty: Yet this allegation makes me think that the alleger has undergone some sort of strange self-lobotomy...which would be an exercise in self-reduction. (Indeed, I would argue, an exercise in self-mutilation.)
Spirited: Richard Weaver, author of “Ideas Have Consequences” describes the plight of self-lobotomized dialectical materialists and/or scientific naturalists:
“…the closer man stands to ruin, the duller grows his realization (for) the annihilation of spiritual being precedes the destruction of temple walls.” (The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, George H. Nash, pp. 30-33)
What’s left after annihilation of spiritual being but a sophistical naturalist or blood and soil man. Though spiritually dead and his conscience dead to sin his intellect remains intact but is worthless for anything but pursuit of self-gratification at any cost and his will is a force of negation.
yeah....
But without the reductionist censorship, the information could be conveyed.
Why on earth would you say that, "In a perfect world we wouldn't have the physical limitations we do?"
How do you define PERFECT? And did you forget that God created, not a "perfect world," but "only" a GOOD one?
Had He created a "perfect world," there would be no place, no role, for man — who, made in the Image of God, possesses reason and free will — that is, a mind capable of effecting action in the real world....
In a "perfect world," there would be nothing for Man to do. There would be no reason for a man to inquire into anything, let alone try to improve the methods and means of his divine stewardship of the natural world (Genesis 2: 8 ff). The existence of Man would be entirely pointless, gratuitous, under such conditions.
8 And the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.So the Lord God had made Adam steward of all the Creation He made, and left it to Adam to control the "epistemology" of His Creation by investing in Adam the divine privilege of naming all the created things.
9 And out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil....
10 And a river went out of Eden to water the garden....
15 And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. [I.e., IMHO Man's divine appointment as steward, not "owner," of of God's Creation, or any aspect of it.]
16 And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat:
17 But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.
18 And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.
19 And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.
20 And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet [i.e., "fitting," or "appropriate"] for him.
Well, suffice to say, according to Genesis 2, Adam did not find "help" to meet his perceived loneliness, absent another being like himself. And so God created Eve....
The rest is "history."
Thank you so much for writing, dear tacticalogic!
I thought we'd already established that you cannot convey "experience".
Thank you for your encouragements, dear YHAOS!
Thank you for your encouragements, dearest sister in Christ!
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