Why we believe in god(s)?

[Unveiled Artist]

Can't remember when I posted this but I didn't know there was a Youtube on it. https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Believe-God-Concise/dp/0984493212

Don't get thrown off by the beginning. It's very informational and you get what you take from it.

 

[steveb1]

A "comprehensive study of how and why the human mind generates religious belief."

Half-truth at best. No "comprehensive study" of religion can rely solely on materialist assumptions. Nor has it been proven that the human brain/mind generates all religious experiences.

The brain is a three-pound skull organ. The psyche isn't.
The brain is some-thing, the person is some-one.

As S.J. Gould said, spirituality and science are two separate, non-overlapping domains, and it is a category error to explain one by the other.

The problem with what the professor is doing is that he - and those who think like him - ineptly attempt to explain qualitative categories with quantitative standards. Gould was right.

 

[blü 2]

The brain is a three-pound skull organ. The psyche isn't.

The psyche is the product of brain function. This is easily demonstrated by the variations in the psyche matching variations in the state of the brain ─ through genetics, drugs including alcohol, disease, trauma, anoxia, dessication, body temperature and so on.

As S.J. Gould said, spirituality and science are two separate, non-overlapping domains, and it is a category error to explain one by the other.

It sounds more aggressive than I intend to call it the difference between fiction and fact, but there's nothing to suggest that the supernatural and its beings exist anywhere but as concepts in brains, as things imagined with no real counterpart.

 

[steveb1]

The psyche is the product of brain function. This is easily demonstrated by the variations in the psyche matching variations in the state of the brain ─ through genetics, drugs including alcohol, disease, trauma, anoxia, dessication, body temperature and so on.
It sounds more aggressive than I intend to call it the difference between fiction and fact, but there's nothing to suggest that the supernatural and its beings exist anywhere but as concepts in brains, as things imagined with no real counterpart.

There's no evidence that the psyche is solely a product of neurological function. That's a theory driven by materialist-reductionist philosophy. No one is arguing that brain states can not or do not affect mental states, but no one has proved that the psyche is only a result of brain activity.

Is consciousness in the brain? Now one might have supposed that contemporary neuroscientists could tell you where consciousness is to be found, but no, its location has never been discovered. Nor has that of longterm memory, or of tacit memory. (This is almost equally interesting, but I cannot discuss it here.) Moreover, no one has explained how the sense information coming along the neural pathways in the brain is transformed into conscious experience. This is the problem of qualia, one of the most discussed issues in contemporary philosophy.

What are qualia? They are the ‘feel’ and ‘look’ of colours, the ‘feel’ and ‘flavour’ of musical sounds in all their infinite variety, the felt texture of objects, the rich (but literally indescribable) tastes and odours of things. Qualia are the raw sensory material of conscious experience, they are what we feel and how we feel it. Though they are the way all our experiences come to us, they are incommunicable to others, for the reason that we have no means of transmitting these ‘feels’, these ‘experiences’, directly from one brain to another. Talking about them is quite inadequate. For instance, how do you describe the goldengreen of a James Grieve apple2, or its individual flavour? You can appeal only to other people’s similar experiences — provided they have had such. If we haven’t had the experience of a particular quale, then we cannot imagine it. Even Wittgenstein recognises this, and says as much (apropos of the smell of coffee).3

Now how does this happen? By what unknown process does the electrochemical message conveying “Sense this as RED!” make whatever unknown entity that does that kind of feeling actually sense it? WHAT does it do to WHAT so as to make WHAT experience the sensation RED ? The answer is that none of these WHATS can be found in the brain, and the whole business of experiencing a quale is completely mysterious. As indeed is the whole business of experiencing anything at all. Experience itself is the great mystery.

There is thus an absolute gulf between the electrochemical message and the subjective experience of RED (or COOL or WET or ANGRY or any other sensation). The experiential side of the process is completely invisible to the scientist.

The End of Materialism by Graham Duncan Martin

However, I'm content to drop it here, since our presuppositions will only result in predictable wheel-spinning.

 

[Mock Turtle]

Is consciousness in the brain? Now one might have supposed that contemporary neuroscientists could tell you where consciousness is to be found, but no, its location has never been discovered. Nor has that of longterm memory, or of tacit memory.

Will your position change if these eventually are located? And we are still very much in the beginnings of understanding the human brain (and mind), so it is hardly surprising to some of us.

 

[blü 2]

There's no evidence that the psyche is solely a product of neurological function. That's a theory driven by materialist-reductionist philosophy. No one is arguing that brain states can not or do not affect mental states, but no one has proved that the psyche is only a result of brain activity.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but no one ever gave a credible hypothesis of how a not-imaginary psyche in this sense could exist in reality; or how the 'immaterial' can be distinguished from the imaginary.

Is consciousness in the brain?

What do we mean by 'consciousness' here? The waking state? Alertness? Self-awareness? And what do you make of the >Global Workspace< hypothesis, which has some experimental support? Besides, one thing we've seen demonstrated again and again is that consciousness is greatly overrated and that just about all the heavy lifting in brain function is done by the non-conscious brain. An easy example is, where are these words I'm typing in the quarter second before I type them since they're not being formulated in my conscious brain, any more than my speech is (you may have come across Auden's noted dictum, 'How do I know what I think till I hear what I say?')

Now one might have supposed that contemporary neuroscientists could tell you where consciousness is to be found, but no, its location has never been discovered.

It seems fair to point out that no one else can show where 'consciousness' is to be found either; but meanwhile brain research according to scientific method is the only systematic enquiry into that and related phenomena.

Nor has that of longterm memory, or of tacit memory. (This is almost equally interesting, but I cannot discuss it here.) Moreover, no one has explained how the sense information coming along the neural pathways in the brain is transformed into conscious experience. This is the problem of qualia, one of the most discussed issues in contemporary philosophy.

I'm not up to date with research into long term memory but I dare say that again only the scientific researchers are systematically examining such problems. As for qualia, it took me a while to work out what the problem was supposed to be, because I don't see any problem. Instead of being like Arnie's terminator and having all our sensory data displayed in numbers down the side of our vision, we, like all the other macrocritters, take our sensory data on board in forms that draw the most direct response. I suspect that your experience of light in the 620-740 nm waveband striking your eye and sending red signals down the optic nerve is not significantly different to mine or anyone else's with normal sight. I suspect that my experience of banana, or olive oil, or wine, or bacon is not significantly different to yours or to anyone else's because the same evolved mechanisms of sense and of interpretation are being used (though of course the connotations may differ).

The End of Materialism by Graham Duncan Martin

However, I'm content to drop it here, since our presuppositions will only result in predictable wheel-spinning.

In the 14 years since he wrote his book, he's had ample opportunity to win the argument, but as far as I can tell he's scarcely been noticed by the scientists. And all he seems to be doing in that brief summary you've linked is saying it's inexplicable, it can't be solved, science doesn't know &c &c instead of noting first that the mapping and describing of the brain and its functions is a massive task, that it's been a work in progress since the 18th century, that in the 20th century the questions began began to be defined, so that when in the 90s new tools for brain research arrived the whole range of enquiry got a massive boost, and that real steady progress has been the story ever since. Does he even have an alternative hypothesis that's expressed in falsifiable terms so it can be the subject of testing?

 

[steveb1]

Will your position change if these eventually are located? And we are still very much in the beginnings of understanding the human brain (and mind), so it is hardly surprising to some of us.

I doubt my position would change, since "location" is not the key issue. It's that the neural systems are quantitative categories and the psyche is a qualitative category - two inherently non-overlapping "magisteria".Locating a non-material psyche "in" neural systems seems an improbability in the first place, but even if it were done, it would be like "locating" a broadcast talk show "in" a radio or a television set. Dualism and/or duality would still exist.

 

[Samantha Rinne]

The psyche is the product of brain function. This is easily demonstrated by the variations in the psyche matching variations in the state of the brain ─ through genetics, drugs including alcohol, disease, trauma, anoxia, dessication, body temperature and so on.
It sounds more aggressive than I intend to call it the difference between fiction and fact, but there's nothing to suggest that the supernatural and its beings exist anywhere but as concepts in brains, as things imagined with no real counterpart.

The materialist would tell you this, yes. But do you know how Deepak Chopra became the spiritual guru (debatable yes, but hear me out) he is today? He was raised Christian in a Hindu country. This is not the point, the point is next. He became secular, and a doctor. He saw firsthand many NDEs of patients. He checked. Many of them were braindead at the time. As in, there was no mind activity. The brain doesn't have an organ for spiritual stuff. The closest is the pineal gland, but still these are just props. The brain has no reason why it should even work.

 

[blü 2]

The materialist would tell you this, yes. But do you know how Deepak Chopra became the spiritual guru (debatable yes, but hear me out) he is today? He was raised Christian in a Hindu country. This is not the point, the point is next. He became secular, and a doctor. He saw firsthand many NDEs of patients. He checked. Many of them were braindead at the time. As in, there was no mind activity. The brain doesn't have an organ for spiritual stuff. The closest is the pineal gland, but still these are just props. The brain has no reason why it should even work.

There are indeed many cases where experienced medical practitioners have found no vital signs and declared the patient dead, only to be proved wrong. We simply have no certain way of determining when or whether life function failure has become irreversible. The (formal) discovery of the diving reflex in adults trapped under ice has been one interesting milestone in the story. But we materialists don't see a Triumph of the Will in all that, simply the world setting us more homework. (But as for Triumphs of the Will, notice how i spared you my opinion of Mr Chopra there.)

 

[steveb1]

The materialist would tell you this, yes. But do you know how Deepak Chopra became the spiritual guru (debatable yes, but hear me out) he is today? He was raised Christian in a Hindu country. This is not the point, the point is next. He became secular, and a doctor. He saw firsthand many NDEs of patients. He checked. Many of them were braindead at the time. As in, there was no mind activity. The brain doesn't have an organ for spiritual stuff. The closest is the pineal gland, but still these are just props. The brain has no reason why it should even work.

That's the problem. It's a massive category error to conflate brain with self. The brain is a 3-pound skull organ. The psyche is nothing but non-material "qualia" and selfhood. Just as science and spirituality are non-overlapping domains, so too are the brain and the psyche. Materialism errs greatly in its brain = mind theory pricesely because it conflates the two domains. Worse, it tries to explain the qualitative domain by quantitative means. An impossibility.

 

[ZenMonkey]

Because it's who we are ... Beyond that, there is always something greater than ourselves. It could be the realization of how incredibly small we are yet also so great.