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So on my personal tumblr blog, I made a post about 3 months ago that said "the Hindu Religion is Bullshit, but man are their gods Trippy" and I still to this day get anonymous messages sent to me from people that I assume are Hindu saying that I'm a piece of shit, and that they want to kill me, ect...  At first I was surprised that this was coming from the hindu's because typically this is the type of thing that I would expect Muslims to do.  So my question to you all is have you ever been harassed by Hindu's for being an atheist/insulting the Hindu religion?

I can honestly say I don't think I have ever said one thing, one way or another, controversial about the Hindu religion :P.

I will make a slight change to that and mention this; when Smite portrayed Kali, there was a huge uproar from Hindus that she was too nude, too sexualized.

The thing is... in the ancient pictures of her, she is fully nude except for human skulls and arms covering her privates... far less "clothing" than the Smite version had. Hindu's are not as... rational... as we would like to make them out to be. They are just as nutty as the rest of us.

(http://lorehound.com/wp-content/gallery/smite-screens/smite_kali_buff1.jpg)

(http://www.movieposterskey.com/postersimages/hindu-goddess-kali-dancing-on-siva.jpg)

(http://www.artnindia.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/IMG12a.jpg)

But yes, it is the smite one that is too nude :P.

Believing in multiple gods is even dumber than believing in one God to me. Solitary

Hinduïsm, budhism, other oriëntal religions, ... often seem like the peaceful variants and more 'open' variants to us because we don't deal with them on a near-daily basis. We don't hear about the shit the radicalized portion of their faiths get into or try to do because we're so preoccupied with the religious bullcrap happening closer to home. The East has had more than it's own fair share fundies holding them back though.

Every religion makes absurd claims and creates outlandish myths, which under ordinary circumstances, no one in their right mind would believe.  If the fantasy gains traction, it becomes a sacred thing.  People defend their sacred outlandish myths with a zeal that no one would protect a known fact.  It always strikes me as odd that the less defensible a thing is, the more people will go to greater lengths to defend it.

My personal 2 cents is that the people who wrote the Mahabharata- (Bhagavad Gida, Rig Veda, etc.) had to be high on something. There definitely is some trippy shit in there. My personal fave are Vimanas

http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/vimanas/esp_vimanas_9.htm

http://www.crystalinks.com/vimanas.html

(http://www.troll.me/images/alien-hair-freak/i-just-smoked-some-hindukush-grown-by-aliens.jpg)

Quote from: Solitary on September 01, 2014, 06:10:07 PM
Believing in multiple gods is even dumber than believing in one God to me. Solitary

Exactly! and that is one of the rebuttles that I made when replying to the first anon that sent me hateful messages, they replied 1 day later saying that I know nothing about Hinduism, after that I have ignored them because apparently they dont even know their own religion.

If Smite used this and translated it exactly to 3D CGI, it would be AMAZING (http://www.artnindia.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/IMG12a.jpg)

Sent from your mom

Quote from: MagetheEntertainer on September 01, 2014, 05:25:30 PM
So on my personal tumblr blog, I made a post about 3 months ago that said "the Hindu Religion is Bullshit, but man are their gods Trippy" and I still to this day get anonymous messages sent to me from people that I assume are Hindu saying that I'm a piece of shit, and that they want to kill me, ect...  At first I was surprised that this was coming from the hindu's because typically this is the type of thing that I would expect Muslims to do.  So my question to you all is have you ever been harassed by Hindu's for being an atheist/insulting the Hindu religion?

Don't worry, no Hindu is going to go to that length as to kill you. They are world-wise, and would not like to suffer in jail for killing some one like you. However, you do not understand Hinduism. Why did you say it is bullshit? You have a serious behavioral problem. Civil people do not do such a thing.

Quote from: Shiranu on September 01, 2014, 05:55:31 PM(http://lorehound.com/wp-content/gallery/smite-screens/smite_kali_buff1.jpg)

But yes, it is the smite one that is too nude :P.

Only that the bulge is a bit too pronounced and the high-lighted. :D

Quote from: Solitary on September 01, 2014, 06:10:07 PM
Believing in multiple gods is even dumber than believing in one God to me.

How come?

Quote from: SGOS on September 02, 2014, 07:48:06 AM
Every religion makes absurd claims and creates outlandish myths, which under ordinary circumstances, no one in their right mind would believe.  If the fantasy gains traction, it becomes a sacred thing.  People defend their sacred outlandish myths with a zeal that no one would protect a known fact.  It always strikes me as odd that the less defensible a thing is, the more people will go to greater lengths to defend it.

Myths are but stories like Aesop's fables. There are variants of Hinduism with no bullshit and that go with science.

Quote from: stromboli on September 02, 2014, 09:34:07 AM
My personal 2 cents is that the people who wrote the Mahabharata- (Bhagavad Gida, Rig Veda, etc.) had to be high on something. There definitely is some trippy shit in there. My personal fave are Vimanas

http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/vimanas/esp_vimanas_9.htm
http://www.crystalinks.com/vimanas.html

That was to make the stories more interesting like the 900 odd years of Adam. Sure, Hindus liked to use Soma (probably Ephedra) and Marijuana, as also liquor (Madya - I think from Mada - Madness, Pride).

Quote from: MagetheEntertainer on September 06, 2014, 11:05:16 PM
Exactly! and that is one of the rebuttles that I made when replying to the first anon that sent me hateful messages, they replied 1 day later saying that I know nothing about Hinduism, after that I have ignored them because apparently they dont even know their own religion.

That is true. There are monotheistic Hindus, Monist Hindus, and even Atheist Hindus (I am one). The truth is that you do not know about Hinduism.

They're only pissed because Tumblr is more suited to posting porn and they're afraid to admit it.

I don't think that a few pissed off people reflect the entirety of a belief system. Having some pissed off Hindus giving you a hard time does not mean the majority of them are pissed, just the ones that saw your website and were vocal enough to say so. I have known exactly 2 people in my life that were from India. Neither one of them had read any of their religious texts and both were essentially atheist.

The theists that come on here to challenge or berate us do not represent the rank and file, because the rank and file just wants to have a job and come home to TV and maybe the newspaper, or video games. Most theists will never visit this website and most of them don't do much more than play video games and surf the net.

Quote from: Aupmanyav on November 24, 2014, 01:27:32 AM
How come?

Because believing in one God, with no evidence is stupid, and believing in more than one multiplies how dumb it is.

Quote from: Aupmanyav on November 24, 2014, 01:31:11 AM
Myths are but stories like Aesop's fables. There are variants of Hinduism with no bullshit and that go with science.

Every religion is based on myths accept Buddhism as Buddha originally taught, and not the various schools that have been corrupted by other religions. And everyone of them claim they agree with science---they "Don't"---you can take anything out of context and make it work for your beliefs, even atheism. Yin Yang doesn't mean particle and wave, for example. Solitary

Quote from: Aupmanyav on November 24, 2014, 01:33:18 AM
That was to make the stories more interesting like the 900 odd years of Adam. Sure, Hindus liked to use Soma (probably Ephedra) and Marijuana, as also liquor (Madya - I think from Mada - Madness, Pride).

A that shows is the Hindu religion is a product of the mind like every other fairy tale. Solitary

Quote from: Aupmanyav on November 24, 2014, 01:36:51 AM
That is true. There are monotheistic Hindus, Monist Hindus, and even Atheist Hindus (I am one). The truth is that you do not know about Hinduism.

Do you realize how condescending and arrogant saying that is? You object to picture of a Goddess's breast being too pronounce, while your belief system brought us the Kama Sutra. Your religion has also been corrupted by the puritanical Christian religion. And saying you are an atheist Hindu that believes in Hinduism is a contradiction, like a Muslim or Christian saying they are. If you believe in God or gods you are religious and not an atheists, whom believe in no supernatural beings or gods. You don't know what atheism is, no gods of any kind, period! Solitary

Quote from: Solitary on December 06, 2014, 10:31:42 AMBecause believing in one God, with no evidence is stupid, and believing in more than one multiplies how dumb it is.

No more, no less. For an atheist Hindu like me, both are EQUALLY dumb. What difference does it make one or a million.

Quote from: Solitary on December 06, 2014, 10:41:47 AMA that shows is the Hindu religion is a product of the mind like every other fairy tale.

All religions are product of mind. Buddhism of Buddha, Judaism of Moses, Christianity o Jesus and Paul, Islam of Mohammad. The difference is that Hinduism is a product of many minds, those of our sages. Nobody got a copyright on that.

Quote from: Solitary on December 06, 2014, 10:53:51 AMYou object to picture of a Goddess's breast being too pronounce, while your belief system brought us the Kama Sutra. Your religion has also been corrupted by the puritanical Christian religion. And saying you are an atheist Hindu that believes in Hinduism is a contradiction, like a Muslim or Christian saying they are. If you believe in God or gods you are religious and not an atheists, whom believe in no supernatural beings or gods. You don't know what atheism is, no gods of any kind, period!

Did I? All I indicated that the breasts were a little too obvious. Of course, Kama Sutra was written by a Hindu, but it is not a religious book. Yes, Hinduism has been corrupted by Christianity to some extent, making some Hindus insist that it is a monotheistic religion, which it is not. Atheism and Hinduism are not in contradiction. Two of our ancient philosophies (darshanas) were atheistic - Samkhya and Vaisesika. Samkhya is advocated by BhagawadGita. Here is a reading from Samkhya if you care to go through it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samkhya#Arguments_against_Ishvara.27s_existence

What I do not believe in is a long list, longer than that of any other atheist: God, soul, creation, birth, death, reincarnation, heaven, hell, need for salvation, divine judgment and raising from dead.

I thought Hindu worshipers were meant to be peaceful meditators, not tumblr feminazis. 

The ignorant visit such sites (and post abusive messages), whether Hindu, Christian or Muslims.

 :fsm: I get shit from Christians are facebook. Like the above poster said, we can be atheist hindus. We can meditate, appreciate nature, and try to understand cosmic clues. Or we can not be pussies. lol jk Understanding reality is different for some people, even if they actually live in reality.

Quote from: MagetheEntertainer on September 01, 2014, 05:25:30 PM
So on my personal tumblr blog, I made a post about 3 months ago that said "the Hindu Religion is Bullshit, but man are their gods Trippy" and I still to this day get anonymous messages sent to me from people that I assume are Hindu saying that I'm a piece of shit, and that they want to kill me, ect...  At first I was surprised that this was coming from the hindu's because typically this is the type of thing that I would expect Muslims to do.  So my question to you all is have you ever been harassed by Hindu's for being an atheist/insulting the Hindu religion?

Yes I have, and they are completely hypocritical asshats. Devout Hindus are in many ways far more hateful and more gifted at wielding illogical brain-rot against human intelligence than the Abrahamic religious followers, and in countries where they dominate they are as violent as any religion gets. This should not be surprising, given the longevity of Hinduism, which gave it more time to fester.

EDIT: Nothing personal, Aupmonyav, but I have seen the ugly side of every major belief system - Jainism has always been small because it never endorsed evil in its name. While I love many of the ideas held by the big religions, not least of all Hinduism, it takes evil to make any religion powerful in this world. It will take evil again in order to maintain its hold on humanity.

Mahatma Gandhi was a pacifist, but he was a Hindu heretic.  He was assassinated by a Hindu zealot.  Killing is allowed in Hinduism.  Of course not being pacifist, doesn't mean that it is illegitimate.  But it is a part of being Indian, just as Shinto is a part of being Japanese, or Judaism is part of being Jewish (but more often observed in the breach).  Hence the controversy regarding US based Hari Krishnas ... and other guru focused exports.  But there are enough Hindus in California, that they have their own temples now, not just house puja.

Deleted

I don't get why this is even a discssion topic. Religion is a religion, it is belief system. Trying to distinguish one from the others is just stupid. As long as it is a belief system there will be fanatics.

If Hinduism was anything 'better', a lot of things in those countries would be 'better'. It's not. It's the same male dominated bullshit percieved in contrast with Abrahamic religions. That makes the difference, what you are comapring it with.

What's the general situation of women and children in India?

Quote from: drunkenshoe on August 23, 2015, 03:11:16 AM
I don't get why this is even a discssion topic. Religion is a religion, it is belief system. Trying to distinguish one from the others is just stupid. As long as it is a belief system there will be fanatics.

Each religion is different. Try comparing Jainism and Buddhism with Christianity and Islam. Well, I am not much of a Hindu, I am a strong atheist and an Advaitist (believer in non-duality).

I was replying to this:

Quote from: peacewithoutgod on August 22, 2015, 01:56:29 PMDevout Hindus are in many ways far more hateful and more gifted at wielding illogical brain-rot against human intelligence than the Abrahamic religious followers, and in countries where they dominate they are as violent as any religion gets.

Peacewithoutgod should make his case by examples. An ad-hoc statement is not enough.

Quote from: drunkenshoe on August 23, 2015, 03:11:16 AMIf Hinduism was anything 'better', a lot of things in those countries would be 'better'. It's not. It's the same male dominated bullshit percieved in contrast with Abrahamic religions.

You are coming to us after a 1000 years of foreign rule and 200 years of inculcation of materialism by the British and 70 years of decay with the ‘grab it if you can’ democracy that we have  and modern perversity. Hinduism at present is weak but is on mend. Except in poor uneducated sections of the society whose numbers are decreasing progressively, men and women are equal partners in life. Women’s education and employment is constantly increasing.

You are aware that by demanding peacewithoutgod make his case by examples, you also claim that among belief systems yours cannot have any violent traits or acts in general, except certain situations, right? And if he does give examples then what will you do? Start to evaluate it case by case by other factors or say that that's not true hinduism but just perverted understanding of it? Does that sound familiar from somewhere?

The majority of muslims and christians and jews are not violent. They are strongly against violence, they are simple people trying to make their way and scared that something will happen to their family and love ones. They believe that what has been going on with their religion, what is being promoted as their religion is just perverted by emperialism, modern political games played in countless levels. Exactly like people in your culture.

You keep saying you are an atheist, but you are defending a religion -or series of religions- by claiming that their inherent qualities hold some truth or essence -different than others- that people don't know about it if they don't see it that way and that those qualities distinguish these belief systems from others. You are saying that your religion -yes your religion- is something that has a fixed essence; an understanding free and from that but changed in 'practice' or some other ways under the attack of a certain other culture.

That's^ the definition of a believer and a religion. You see your system as entitled a place above others. Isn't that something also fundemantlly conflicts with what those belief systems offer?

See, as long as a system is a religion, it stops being universal just there.

It seems to me like you are confused about two things. First, the set of conditions and factors -inner/outer- that transforms a society and its culture; its religion through time AND that the religions are just primitive control systems invented by men to impose on to societies by a minority in power according to certain benefits and profits -be it in favour of people or not, irrelevant at this point, but mostly not- so the wheel can turn, therefore they change through time. These are the same things. It's not just about what happens to a society while that is a factor, it is about the fundamental quality of religion.

:exclaim: The belief systems you are defending are likely to include violent groups as much as the others, because their members are homo sapient. We are violent, social primates.  You see yours different; above the others -like all others- because you believe in it. And in your case, definition in contrast plays a lot of role as I said before and makes it easier.

:exclaim: It's basically what Western cultures do to define all the other cultures, including yours. Creating a definition in contrast and transform the same problems of their societies with different terms than the ones less developed ones into something else; create identities. Like identifying certain crimes -like rape and domestic violence- with islamic or other eastern cultures. Demonising the other.

You are identifiying the cultural and religious corruption with British Imperialism. Is it a factor? Certainly. But it doesn't change that all belief systems inherently define themselves and their members above others. That's the root of the idea. Doesn't matter how 'peaceful' one looks compared ot others.

If Abrahamic religions vanished from face of the earth over a night, the religions left behind would fill the same space transforming and adapting to the same machine in a very short time. And after a few generations, it would be fully functional in the same violent manner as those and people would be discussing the terms of killing someone according to Hinduism with the same terms, genuinely thinking how peaceful and accepting their religions are. 

Quote from: drunkenshoe on August 23, 2015, 05:45:04 AMThe majority of Muslims and Christians and Jews are not violent. They are strongly against violence, ..
You keep saying you are an atheist, but you are defending a religion ..
You are saying that your religion - yes your religion- is something that has a fixed essence; an understanding free and from that but changed in 'practice' or some other ways under the attack of a certain other culture. ..
the religions are just primitive control systems invented by men to impose on to societies by a minority in power..
The belief systems you are defending are likely to include violent groups as much as the others ..
the ones less developed ones into something else ..

Where are you from Kepler-63? Please do not make statements which make people laugh.
Kindly understand that although I am an atheist, but I remain a Hindu. The philosophy of Advaita (non-duality) does not allow a God, because then it makes two things - God and the denizens of the world. Advaita includes even the non-living things.
Foreign domination for 1000 years has changed the culture of all people in the world. Yes, Hinduism is facing the onslaught of Western culture, but we know through history that it will survive it. Hinduism is a very tenacious religion.
In that case I would say that your understanding of religion is very deficient. Religion is a protector of society, a doctor to its adherents, and is a scientific researcher a step ahead of science. Do you know that 3,000 years ago, the Nasadiya hymn in RigVeda declared that there is a relationship between existence and non-existence? Science came to that stage only in the last Century.
We do not have any violent groups. That is why adherents of other religions who came to India have never faced any problem. We did not even ask them to adopt our ways*. They were given all freedom.
That is a very imperialistic statement. What is that which the developed countries have and India or China do not have. Indian business administrators and technocrats are slowly taking over the highest positions in the corporate world. Our economies are doing the best in the world and we have a nice balance of foreign exchange (USD 354 billion to be exact. Of course, at the moment India cannot compare with China, but the predictions are that by 2050, it will overtake the US economy and be the second largest economy in the world after China).

* The exception is in case of Zoroastrians. The Gujarat king where they landed gave all freedom but placed two conditions. 1. That they will adopt Gujarati language. 2. There women will wear 'saris'. :D
The Zoroastrians accepted the conditions and have lived happily for 1,400 years and in the process becoming some of the richest people in India including the House of Tatas.

It is a simple metaphysical question ... potentiality vs actuality.  And if there is a human nature.  If there is a human nature, then it is part of potentiality, since at any given time, a given human isn't violent.  But every human is capable of violence under certain external/internal conditions.  That is where I would leave it ... except I keep dumping all my sins and every other person's sins, into the human nature bucket (this is Biblical, from Genesis).  Biblical verses also praise human nature.  I could divide it along the lines of a being with rather low EQ, who has a relatively high IQ.

But there are those who deny any kind of metaphysics (they are ignoring parts of the dictionary that use metaphysical words to define some generalities that they do claim to use).  But one can start one's verbal axioms at a different place.  And some will deny potentiality (as only what is actual is factual) ... and for that same reason of "factuality" will deny that there is a human nature, because they regard that as an illegitimate generalization ... that there are only individuals, and that no two people share any characteristics that are ... factual.  That similarities are apparent only.

Maybe cocktail parties at philosophy conventions are dull, because nobody says anything, because they can't agree on a common basis for thought, language or conversation ;-)

Quote from: Munch on April 05, 2015, 07:59:53 PM
I thought Hindu worshipers were meant to be peaceful meditators, not tumblr feminazis. 

"feminazi". There's that word again.

Quote from: MagetheEntertainer on September 01, 2014, 05:25:30 PM
So on my personal tumblr blog, I made a post about 3 months ago that said "the Hindu Religion is Bullshit, but man are their gods Trippy" and I still to this day get anonymous messages sent to me from people that I assume are Hindu saying that I'm a piece of shit, and that they want to kill me, ect...  At first I was surprised that this was coming from the hindu's because typically this is the type of thing that I would expect Muslims to do.  So my question to you all is have you ever been harassed by Hindu's for being an atheist/insulting the Hindu religion?

It sounds like you are harassing, and they are harassing back. Their calling you a piece of shit is no more disrespectful than you posting about  how their beliefs are bullshit when you know they are your audience. In this case, you reap what you sow, death threats aside.

"feminazi" is unfair ... most women are "femicommies".  Fortunately like most males, I am OK with fraternizing with the "enemy" ;-)

Quote from: Baruch on August 23, 2015, 10:18:29 AM
"feminazi" is unfair ... most women are "femicommies".  Fortunately like most males, I am OK with fraternizing with the "enemy" ;-)

I guess I fail to see the intended humor in that.

My apologies then (fraternizing).

Quote from: Aupmanyav on August 23, 2015, 09:47:07 AM
Where are you from Kepler-63? Please do not make statements which make people laugh.
Kindly understand that although I am an atheist, but I remain a Hindu. The philosophy of Advaita (non-duality) does not allow a God, because then it makes two things - God and the denizens of the world. Advaita includes even the non-living things.
Foreign domination for 1000 years has changed the culture of all people in the world. Yes, Hinduism is facing the onslaught of Western culture, but we know through history that it will survive it. Hinduism is a very tenacious religion.
In that case I would say that your understanding of religion is very deficient. Religion is a protector of society, a doctor to its adherents, and is a scientific researcher a step ahead of science. Do you know that 3,000 years ago, the Nasadiya hymn in RigVeda declared that there is a relationship between existence and non-existence? Science came to that stage only in the last Century.
We do not have any violent groups. That is why adherents of other religions who came to India have never faced any problem. We did not even ask them to adopt our ways. They were given all freedom.
That is a very imperialistic statement. What is that which the developed countries have and India or China do not have. Indian business administrators and technocrats are slowly taking over the highest positions in the corporate world. Our economies are doing the best in the world and we have a nice balance of foreign exchange (USD 354 billion to be exact. Of course, at the moment India cannot compare with China, but the predictions are that by 2050, it will overtake the US economy and be the second largest economy in the world after China).

Obviously, you didn't get anything I wrote beause you are still doing the same thing. You are defining your belief system as something completely different than others and defend that it can explain universe. You might as well be a muslim comparing Allah to Christian god and say that your holly book/religion actually includes scientific progress if you can interpret it 'correctly'.

You don't understand what science or religion is. Anyway, it is a waste of time.




















 

Quote from: Baruch on August 23, 2015, 10:26:43 AM
My apologies then (fraternizing).

You don't need to apologize to me.

Quote from: drunkenshoe on August 23, 2015, 10:28:52 AMYou are defining your belief system as something completely different than others and defend that it can explain universe. .. You don't understand what science or religion is. Anyway, it is a waste of time.

Yes, Drunkenshoe. Advaita is different, and especially with my modification (we are allowed to do so in Hinduism). No God, no soul, no heaven, no hell, no karma transferring over non-existent future lives, no birth, no death, even no creation, and complete acceptance with the latest in science. Since you do not want discuss it any further, I will also stop.

Quote from: Baruch on August 23, 2015, 10:18:29 AM
"feminazi" is unfair ... most women are "femicommies".  Fortunately like most males, I am OK with fraternizing with the "enemy" ;-)

Are they really? And I thought they were "lesbolorenabobbits" ;-0

Using a Hindu analogy, to apply to this whole section ...

Devas are benevolent gods.  Asuras are anti-Deva-gods.  Astika vs Nastika.  This was clearly re-used in Babylon 5.  If I were Hindu, I would see opposing religions as being of the Asuras ... but atheists (and ancient India had the Lokayatas) would be Asuras who are in denial of their own divinity ;-)

Like I mentioned, I find the POV of Hinduism to be very useful to unravel conundrums.  A Swiss Army Knife of theology.

No, I shit every morning. Do devas/Gods do that? I am under no illusion. Yes, many see this as 'asuri prakriti'.:D
You see, Baaruch, I am guided by Kalama Sutta, so no hocus-pocus.

Quote from: Aupmanyav on August 23, 2015, 11:18:17 AM
Yes, Drunkenshoe. Advaita is different, and especially with my modification (we are allowed to do so in Hinduism). No God, no soul, no heaven, no hell, no karma transferring over non-existent future lives, no birth, no death, even no creation, and complete acceptance with the latest in science. Since you do not want discuss it any further, I will also stop.

Aah you fucking moron....

Quote from: Aupmanyav on August 23, 2015, 11:18:17 AM
...no birth, no death, ...and complete acceptance with the latest in science.

Woo! Woooooo!!! Now that makes perfect sense! Sorry, but in all honesty how can that not be the silliest paradox of the century?

Science says ... everything is a quantum field/string, with no life and no consciousness.  So no birth and not death in body or in mind.  Basically the same as the Buddha's argument, which the Buddha made from only introspection ... that there is no real self ... because as Heraclitus says ... there are no constants, only change.  A self would imply something (you) are a constant.  But people insist on believing six impossible things before breakfast, even atheists.

Quote from: drunkenshoe on August 23, 2015, 03:41:23 PMAah you fucking moron ..

Now, I do not appreciate that. You have signed out of the topic. That is OK. But you have no right to stop other people to continue with the topic. I am not addressing you. And kindly do not get angry, use civil language.

Quote from: peacewithoutgod on August 23, 2015, 03:53:10 PMWoo! Woooooo!!! Now that makes perfect sense! Sorry, but in all honesty how can that not be the silliest paradox of the century?

No there is no paradox. When we are born what constitutes us of is already there, and when we die the molecules go to form other associations. Nothing dies, nothing gets destroyed. So, what is birth and what is death?

s

Quote from: Aupmanyav on August 23, 2015, 10:10:18 PM
Now, I do not appreciate that. You have signed out of the topic. That is OK. But you have no right to stop other people to continue with the topic. I am not addressing you. And do not get angry, use civil language.

Much as I hate to see Drunkenshoe melting down like that, I tend to appreciate how this site is not over-moderated to discourage people from showing what they are really like. This one has had her really good moments too, and those sites which would ban overwhelmingly decent but over-stressed people the first time they break down are wastelands for human intelligence and empathy.

Quote from: Aupmanyav on August 23, 2015, 10:17:16 PM
No there is no paradox. When we are born what constitutes us of is already there, and when we die the molecules go to form other associations. Nothing dies, nothing gets destroyed. So, what is birth and what is death?

That isn't science at all. Matter is conserved through all its transitions, but matter does not equal life. I am the dust of ancient stars which died so that this Earth could form from which life would arise - that is a nice thought, and a true one, but it is no effective denial of the fact that life begins with dead matter, and eventually returns to the same.

The question of how life should be defined has been one of the biggest subjects of debate, but if you argue scientifically (as you purport to), then you would only agree that it at very least requires an organization of molecules which can indefinitely reproduce itself down through generations. Such an organization would be you. Rocks don't do that, and this is the difference between life and death. Birth (of some sort no matter what the means) begins when new copies of existing forms are made.

Quote from: Baruch on August 23, 2015, 05:43:17 PM
Science says ... everything is a quantum field/string, with no life and no consciousness.  So no birth and not death in body or in mind.  Basically the same as the Buddha's argument, which the Buddha made from only introspection ... that there is no real self ... because as Heraclitus says ... there are no constants, only change.  A self would imply something (you) are a constant.  But people insist on believing six impossible things before breakfast, even atheists.

If you think like that, then breakfast must be impossible too - yet somehow I suspect you believe in it anyway :-P

Quote from: peacewithoutgod on August 23, 2015, 10:32:33 PMThe question of how life should be defined has been one of the biggest subjects of debate, but if you argue scientifically (as you purport to), then you would only agree that it at very least requires an organization of molecules which can indefinitely reproduce itself down through generations. Such an organization would be you. Rocks don't do that, and this is the difference between life and death. Birth (of some sort no matter what the means) begins when new copies of existing forms are made.

Define life anyway you want but do not abandon or hide truth. When I die and am cremated, my bones will turn into Calcium Oxide (CaOsubcript2). When immersed in the waters of River Ganges at Haridwar (where traditionally my family immerses the bones of its dead), it will be part of the sediment. Then some day, due to tectonic shift of Himalaya, this sediment will go down into the bowels of earth and get cooked. It will come out again as a metamorphosed rock or magma/lava. Tell me, how rocks are different from life? All through life, we are nourished by vegetation or flesh which in turn is nourished by vegetation which is nourished by the minerals in the soil. It is but a chemical cycle. Life is not other than nature, just like rocks, air, water, sand, etc.

Quote from: peacewithoutgod on August 23, 2015, 10:57:51 PMIf you think like that, then breakfast must be impossible too - yet somehow I suspect you believe in it anyway :-P

Breakfast and its enjoyment by senses and mind also is part of this cycle. That reminds me that my wife must have completed her morning worship (the rest of my family is theist) and the breakfast must be ready.

QuoteTell me, how rocks are different from life?

While I agree with your basic premise, this one is a bit of a stretch.

Life has a sense of awareness. Rocks do not. Life has biological functions. A rock does not. Life reproduces. A rock does not.

Now, if you are using a more vague definition of life to simply mean anything that is a part of the cycle of life, death, recycle... then that makes a bit more sense, but to Westerners life has a more scientific meaning of being something that reproduces.

Quote from: Aupmanyav on August 23, 2015, 11:07:16 PM
Tell me, how rocks are different from life?

LOL, it's what an organism does vs. what a rock does. You may be made of the same basic components as the rock, but you are not those components - you are the organization of them into a form, pre-defined by a chemically-coded system such as DNA (or in the case of ultra-primitive forms, RNA) which can replicate itself. Without such organization which defines "organism", there is no life, and even if you would dispute this you weren't around to see what happened before your birth, nor will it really be you in living form after your death.

Quote from: Shiranu on August 24, 2015, 12:02:02 AMLife has a sense of awareness.

Misleading awareness with very limited senses (they miss everything but the visual spectrum and miss everything but a small portion of hearable sounds). We have been molded by nature just as a grain of sand or on a sea-shore also is molded by nature. Do not let this make you to miss the bigger picture. :D

I really do not like that conciousness or self is an illusion stuff. Because obviously it is not an illusion.

Quote from: Aupmanyav on August 24, 2015, 12:35:33 AM
Misleading awareness with very limited senses (they miss everything but the visual spectrum and miss everything but a small portion of hearable sounds). We have been molded by nature just as a grain of sand or on a sea-shore also is molded by nature. Do not let this make you to miss the bigger picture. :D

Again, it all depends on what definition of life you are using. To a westerner that awareness of the small portion of reality is what differentiates the living from the dead, or the animate from the inanimate.

I am not saying one train of though is right, wrong, better or worse than the other, just helping you realize that what you are saying is something that will not inherently make sense to the western mind because we have entirely different belief systems and philosophical heritages.

The following is my opinion and I could be competently wrong but I see it as...

Parents try to force their kids to believe what they do(forcing never works for anything!). You cannot force someone to believe something just as you cannot force some one to love you. If you annoy someone hard enough they might say they love you just to get you to shut up.
In doing this the kids don't actually learn the teachings but have "faith" in them so their parents will stop annoying them. This has been going on for so long most people don't understand the teachings nowadays. This is also do to modern materialism. Most "religious" people haven't a clue what a spiritual experience is.
This is why we have religion as it is today. Then again... there's nothing wrong with the world.

(http://www.shiningmountainspress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Mind-is-Blind.jpg)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJtQYpzJ0dM

Devolving backwards with glorious abandon
Delirium â€" In a gilded cage
Aching like an open wound
In consecrated disillusion
Man crawls back into the slime
Like carrion upon carcasses of slaughtered beasts
Successors â€" scraping at your gates
Spine broken underfoot in rotten evolution
Drowning in eternities of neglect
Constant and eternal
As it carved into the flesh of earth
Under the sovereign-doctrines
The inner iron-discipline

The slaves shall serve
Chaos reign supreme
The slaves shall serve
In corrupt insanity
The slaves shall serve
Alone in decrepitude
The slaves shall serve
In reverse spirituality
The slaves shall serve
Chaos reign supreme
The slaves shall serve
In corrupt insanity
The slaves shall serve
Alone in decrepitude
The slaves shall serve
In reverse spirituality

In piles of bone building towers to the sky
Kneeling â€" In dying contemplation
Spitting the futile prayers
Towering to be closest to the gods
In spineless submission
Swarming under isoclinic cromlechs of death
Culling â€" mormillion opiate-masses
Resting on the laurels of mass graves
Climbing gold mountains, in disposable waves

The slaves shall serve
Chaos reign supreme
The slaves shall serve
In corrupt insanity
The slaves shall serve
Alone in decrepitude
The slaves shall serve
In reverse spirituality

Rot of humanity
As their males birth’ death and female hyenas
Under disciplinary-suffering
The inner strata-discipline

The slaves shall serve

Quote from: Aupmanyav on August 24, 2015, 12:35:33 AM
Misleading awareness with very limited senses (they miss everything but the visual spectrum and miss everything but a small portion of hearable sounds). We have been molded by nature just as a grain of sand or on a sea-shore also is molded by nature. Do not let this make you to miss the bigger picture. :D

No, she has "life" conflated with "consciousness". Consciousness isn't something which plants have, but they do have life. Life is organized and self-replicating, that's the bottom line. The rocks are not life, they are formless resources for life.

Quote from: peacewithoutgod on August 24, 2015, 02:08:34 AM
No, she has "life" conflated with "consciousness". Consciousness isn't something which plants have, but they do have life. Life is organized and self-replicating. The rocks are not life, they are formless resources for life.

http://www.hindupedia.com/en/Consciousness

QuoteIt is the Sphinx’s riddle: What is consciousness? It is something we take for granted and make use of every moment of our lives, without which we are not what we think ourselves to be, and yet when we want to know it more deeply, it eludes us. When we know it, our life’s aim is fulfilled, we are free from all anxieties, all troubles.

We make use of words like knowledge, consciousness, awareness, intuition, almost as synonyms. Etymology, so far as abstract things are concerned, does not help us much. Usage takes us a long way, but leaves us short of the destination. Philosophical books, with their various arguments and conclusions, confuse us. All this because they try to explain that which is at the root of all explanations, and nothing can explain itself by itself. Any argument or explanation, talk or discussion, from start to finish, is all consciousness. Neither in dreams nor in the waking state are we free of it even for a split moment. Being always in and surrounded by it, how can we say what it is? For a thing to be known, it must be put in front of us. Being everywhere under all conditions, in and around us as well as in and around other things and beings, it cannot be known, except in bits, leaving out an almost infinite part of it, thus giving us the uncomfortable feeling that what little we know does not authorize us to assert we have known it. Still, no one, once they start thinking about it, can ever remain satisfied with a piecemeal knowledge of it.

We shall try to approach the problem from the Upanishadic point of view, and see how far the ancient rishis succeeded in their attempts at unravelling the mystery of consciousness. But as we have to put their thoughts and words into English, we have to add notes on the Sanskrit words and phrases the rishis have used, and to their English equivalents as well.

Well actually....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGLABm7jJ-Y

https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=1SQuadczM9oC&oi=fnd&pg=PR5&dq=bacterial+intelligence&ots=w4oxVSOIi9&sig=3JFIJKSf3KCIWFYvuWFuB_VKHdg#v=onepage&q&f=false
(https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=1SQuadczM9oC&oi=fnd&pg=PR5&dq=bacterial+intelligence&ots=w4oxVSOIi9&sig=3JFIJKSf3KCIWFYvuWFuB_VKHdg#v=onepage&q&f=false)
(http://s29.postimg.org/ybrt0pxav/books_003.png)
http://www.nature.com/news/how-brainless-slime-molds-redefine-intelligence-1.11811 (http://www.nature.com/news/how-brainless-slime-molds-redefine-intelligence-1.11811)

QuoteSomething scientists have come to understand is that slime molds are much smarter than they look. One species in particular, the SpongeBob SquarePantsâ€"yellow Physarum polycephalum, can solve mazes, mimic the layout of man-made transportation networks and choose the healthiest food from a diverse menuâ€"and all this without a brain or nervous system. "Slime molds are redefining what you need to have to qualify as intelligent," Reid says.

http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpls.2013.00354/full

QuoteRoot apex of higher plants shows very high sensitivity to environmental stimuli. The root cap acts as the most prominent plant sensory organ; sensing diverse physical parameters such as gravity, light, humidity, oxygen, and critical inorganic nutrients. However, the motoric responses to these stimuli are accomplished in the elongation region. This spatial discrepancy was solved when we have discovered and characterized the transition zone which is interpolated between the apical meristem and the subapical elongation zone. Cells of this zone are very active in the cytoskeletal rearrangements, endocytosis and endocytic vesicle recycling, as well as in electric activities. Here we discuss the oscillatory nature of the transition zone which, together with several other features of this zone, suggest that it acts as some kind of command center. In accordance with the early proposal of Charles and Francis Darwin, cells of this root zone receive sensory information from the root cap and instruct the motoric responses of cells in the elongation zone.

http://scienceblog.com/78369/rats-will-try-to-save-members-of-their-own-species-from-drowning/#2JpskrAB25B33fMe.97 (http://scienceblog.com/78369/rats-will-try-to-save-members-of-their-own-species-from-drowning/#2JpskrAB25B33fMe.97)

QuoteRecent research has shown that a rat will help members of its own species to escape from a tubelike cage. The helping rat will show such prosocial behavior even if it does not gain any advantage from it. To see whether these rodents will also help when one of their own is about to drown, Sato’s team conducted three sets of experiments involving a pool of water. One rat was made to swim for its life in the pool, with another being in a cage adjacent to it. The soaked rat could only gain access to a dry and safe area in the cage if its cagemate opened a door for it.

Sato’s team found that rats quickly learned that to help their distressed and soaked fellow rat, they had to open the door. The rats were, however, only quick to open the door when there was actually a truly distressed cagemate nearby who needed to be saved. The experiments also showed that rats dislike being soaked. Those who had a previous experience of being immersed in water were also much quicker at learning how to save a cagemate than those who had not been immersed.

The researchers also watched what happened when rats had to choose between opening the door to help their distressed cagemate or accessing a different door to obtain a chocolate treat for themselves. In most cases, rats chose to help their cagemate before going for the food. According to Sato, this suggests that, for a rat, the relative value of helping others is greater than the benefit of a food reward.

Quote from: Shiranu on August 24, 2015, 12:52:48 AM.. just helping you realize that what you are saying is something that will not inherently make sense to the western mind because we have entirely different belief systems and philosophical heritages.

I realize that. What I say does not make sense even to a large number of Hindus as well. :D

Quote from: peacewithoutgod on August 24, 2015, 02:08:34 AMConsciousness isn't something which plants have, ..

Take the excellent video put up by Nihil-ist, plants do have awareness, more than that of humans. They smell diseases and predators by pheromones and respond. Probably the first such experiment was done by an Indian polymath, Jagdish Chandra Bose. There is a whole range of varying awarenesses right from bacteria to humans. Only that we have a little more of it in some respects, though dogs are better at hearing (the first indication that a family member is nearing the house is given by our pug even when they park their cars which is at some distance from our apartment).

Humans have neuro-typical chauvinism like the other mega-fauna.  We use our own example as the paradigm.  Indeed, we know life, but don't understand it.  Knowledge is like knowing like.  Understanding goes deeper.  With Western thinking, there is only Black/White .. no grey, no color.  Worse than Kansas in the Wizard of Oz. worse than TV in the 50s ;-)

One person talks about defining life ... and that is what one does in language and thought.  But reality, including life, makes word salad out of human thought and language ... as if those were primary.  Though mythology has said that the universe as spoken into existence, I think this means perception, which is only part of the creative process (like only part of how I am typing now).

Aupmanyav ... one problem is how we use language.  "Life" as a capitalized word is not the same as "life" in lower case.  "life" is more specific than "Life" ... just as I use "G-d" differently than god.

CrucifyCindy ... again language is a problem.  When a Westerner uses the word "illusion" it isn't what the Easterner is talking about.  To a Westerner, "illusion" is something a stage magician does.  But it is more like a mistaken recognition ... like seeing a rope in the dark and thinking it is a snake.  The idea that there was a snake there, was an illusion, but something else was there, it wasn't just a hallucination.  In my own version, I have no "self" in Western terms ... so this would match the no-self of Buddhism, but what I mean isn't that there isn't any other definition of "self", but that I have a non-standard definition.  My "self" is expansive, not contractive.  So relative to the usual view ... I should use a different word, but we don't have one in English ... just a phrase ... I realize I am the ocean, not just a single wave.  But that doesn't mean that the ocean or the wave don't exist, or that a magician conjured them into the minds of a manipulable audience.  And I love stage magic!  More specifically, I agree with Thich Nhat Han's term, Interbeing ... because my basis of understanding is being, not atoms, because I am not reductionist or Pythagorean.  Both I and a rock or atom, have being, but rocks don't have the self awareness in the human sense, because they aren't human.  Like understands like, so I can understand humans, but I will never understand rocks (in spite of study of petrology) ... to understand a rock, I have to be a rock.  But as Aupmanyav says, I will be a rock, and then I will understand rocks, as part of the universes' natural process of self understanding ... both consciousness and unconsciousness, both animate and plant, both life and non-life.  Death is just a door of continuous "self" transformation ... from finite to infinite.

Quote from: Aupmanyav on August 24, 2015, 02:56:07 AM
Take the excellent video put up by Nihil-ist, plants do have awareness, more than that of humans. They smell diseases and predators by pheromones and respond. Probably the first such experiment was done by an Indian polymath, Jagdish Chandra Bose. There is a whole range of varying awarenesses right from bacteria to humans. Only that we have a little more of it in some respects, though dogs are better at hearing (the first indication that a family member is nearing the house is given by our pug even when they park their cars which is at some distance from our apartment).

I don't know much about the above, but the very fact that it's been played up so much as a media side show should be enough to trip any skeptic's woo radar.  Scientifically, plants lack nerve fibers, much less a central nervous system, so how can they really "sense" anything? We know they respond to their environment photochemically, and they  respond in certain ways to chemicals which they come in contact with, and that probably sums it up most accurately. If they "sense" predators, what evolutionary purpose would that serve, when they cannot evade them anyway?

Chemicals, which are also the base of human consciousness. In case of predators, plants give out smells which are unpleasant to the predators. Evolution is very smart, very very smart. See, what it has done with humans with hormones! Enslaved us.

Quote from: Aupmanyav on August 24, 2015, 09:48:51 AM
Chemicals, which are also the base of human consciousness. In case of predators, plants give out smells which are unpleasant to the predators. Evolution is very smart, very very smart. See, what it has done with humans with hormones! Enslaved us.

Eeeuuuuwwww - I sure hope you feel better after spraying that wooful diarrhea all over this forum!

Quote from: Aupmanyav on August 24, 2015, 09:48:51 AM
In case of predators, plants give out smells which are unpleasant to the predators.

Some of them do, yet somehow plant-eating animal species abound on this planet.

Quote from: Aupmanyav on August 24, 2015, 09:48:51 AM
Evolution is very smart, very very smart. See, what it has done with humans with hormones! Enslaved us.

The one thing which evolutionary scientists are in agreement on is that evolution has no consciousness. It's a process, and that's it. To be specific, Natural Selection doesn't even work, it just happens. It's what happens when matter exists in the conditions which are most conducive to energy exchanges, and these physical forces give rise to complex chemistry, from which in turn biological processes can arise. Chain reactions give rise to self-replicating chemical chemical codes, and those which are best at doing the same win by surviving.

Now fast-forward to this day, where some plants emit toxins to discourage animals from eating them, because their chemical (genetic) code was accidentally altered during replication in a way which saved those which had that change from extinction while those with unchanged genes perished. It's only one way by which the dumb luck of natural selection helps plants which animals would find tasty to survive - others don't resist being consumed by animals, but encourage them by offering nice, tasty fruits, nuts, and berries to ensure their own reproduction. Nobody designed any of this, nor even thought of it, it all developed as an accumulation of accidents which proved beneficial to the organisms which bear the marks of those accidents. We know this because when scientists examine organs which are as complex or more as a human-designed watch, there is no evidence revealed of the top-down design which is the mark of intelligence, such as that which would design a watch. Instead, it all accumulated from the bottom up, which nobody with less than 4.8 billion years to play with could have "designed intelligently". Then again, why would one begin the human eye "design" with a tiny, photosensitive spot on the skin of a primitive marine microorganism, with almost as many improvements accumulated as errors compensated for between that and eyes on mammals and birds, one mutation at a time?

Quote from: peacewithoutgod on August 24, 2015, 10:46:06 AM
Eeeuuuuwwww - I sure hope you feel better after spraying that wooful diarrhea all over this forum!
Some of them do, yet somehow plant-eating animal species abound on this planet.
The one thing which evolutionary scientists are in agreement on is that evolution has no consciousness. It's a process, and that's it. To be specific, Natural Selection doesn't even work, it just happens. It's what happens when matter exists in the conditions which are most conducive to energy exchanges, and these physical forces give rise to complex chemistry, from which in turn biological processes can arise. Chain reactions give rise to self-replicating chemical chemical codes, and those which are best at doing the same win by surviving.

Now fast-forward to this day, where some plants emit toxins to discourage animals from eating them, because their chemical (genetic) code was accidentally altered during replication in a way which saved those which had that change from extinction while those with unchanged genes perished. It's only one way by which the dumb luck of natural selection helps plants which animals would find tasty to survive - others don't resist being consumed by animals, but encourage them by offering nice, tasty fruits, nuts, and berries to ensure their own reproduction. Nobody designed any of this, nor even thought of it, it all developed as an accumulation of accidents which proved beneficial to the organisms which bear the marks of those accidents. We know this because when scientists examine organs which are as complex or more as a human-designed watch, there is no evidence revealed of the top-down design which is the mark of intelligence, such as that which would design a watch. Instead, it all accumulated from the bottom up, which nobody with less than 4.8 billion years to play with could have "designed intelligently". Then again, why would one begin the human eye "design" with a tiny, photosensitive spot on the skin of a primitive marine microorganism, with almost as many improvements accumulated as errors compensated for between that and eyes on mammals and birds, one mutation at a time?

I'm sure the "experts" a few thousand years ago would of agreed it was all god. You just listen to the experts? In 100 years we will be looked at as imbeciles just like the people 100 years ago from today.
Anything outside your paradigm is woo. The media I posted is by the Smithsonian and other sources which can be checked.
The reason plants have so many predators is the same reason you have so much bacteria living on and in you. To finish the cycle.
Nature is intelligent in it's self and we're nature. You come out of the world not into it.
http://www.nature.com/news/how-brainless-slime-molds-redefine-intelligence-1.11811

QuoteFrom the sixteenth century on, mind has been progressively expunged from the phenomenal world. . . . Scientific consciousness is alienated consciousness: there is no ecstatic merger with nature, but rather total separation from it. Subject and object are always seen in opposition to each other. . . . The logical end point of this world view is a feeling of total reification: everything is an object, alien, not-me; and I am ultimately an object too, an alienated “thing” in a world of other, equally meaningless things.

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141111-plants-have-a-hidden-internet

QuoteWhile that argument rages on, other researchers have found evidence that plants can go one better, and communicate through the mycelia. In 2010, Ren Sen Zeng of South China Agricultural University in Guangzhou found that when plants are attached by harmful fungi, they release chemical signals into the mycelia that warn their neighbours.

Zeng's team grew pairs of tomato plants in pots. Some of the plants were allowed to form mycorrhizae.

Once the fungal networks had formed, the leaves of one plant in each pair were sprayed with Alternaria solani, a fungus that causes early blight disease. Air-tight plastic bags were used to prevent any above-ground chemical signalling between the plants.

After 65 hours, Zeng tried to infect the second plant in each pair. He found they were much less likely to get blight, and had significantly lower levels of damage when they did, if they had mycelia.

"We suggest that tomato plants can 'eavesdrop' on defense responses and increase their disease resistance against potential pathogen," Zeng and his colleagues wrote. So not only do the mycorrhizae allow plants to share food, they help them defend themselves.

It has taken decades to piece together what the fungal internet can do. Back in 1997, Suzanne Simard of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver found one of the first pieces of evidence. She showed that Douglas fir and paper birch trees can transfer carbon between them via mycelia. Others have since shown that plants can exchange nitrogen and phosphorus as well, by the same route.

Simard now believes large trees help out small, younger ones using the fungal internet. Without this help, she thinks many seedlings wouldn't survive. In the 1997 study, seedlings in the shade â€" which are likely to be short of food - got more carbon from donor trees.

"These plants are not really individuals in the sense that Darwin thought they were individuals competing for survival of the fittest," says Simard in the 2011 documentary Do Trees Communicate? "In fact they are interacting with each other, trying to help each other survive."

However, it is controversial how useful these nutrient transfers really are. "We certainly know it happens, but what is less clear is the extent to which it happens," says Lynne Boddy of Cardiff University in the UK.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-the-tree-frog-has-redefined-our-view-of-biology-165716397/?no-ist

QuoteWith just a flick of her finger, Warkentin has demonstrated a phenomenon that is transforming biology. After decades of thinking of genes as a “blueprint”â€"the coded DNA strands dictate to our cells exactly what to do and when to do itâ€"biologists are coming to terms with a confounding reality. Life, even an entity as seemingly simple as a frog egg, is flexible. It has options. At five days or so, red-eyed tree frog eggs, developing right on schedule, can suddenly take a different path if they detect vibrations from an attacking snake: They hatch early and try their luck in the pond below.

The egg’s surprising responsiveness epitomizes a revolutionary concept in biology called phenotypic plasticity, which is the flexibility an organism shows in translating its genes into physical features and actions. The phenotype is pretty much everything about an organism other than its genes (which scientists call the genotype). The concept of phenotypic plasticity serves as an antidote to simplistic cause-and-effect thinking about genes; it tries to explain how a gene or set of genes can give rise to multiple outcomes, depending partly on what the organism encounters in its environment. The study of evolution has so long centered on genes themselves that, Warkentin says, scientists have assumed that “individuals are different because they’re genetically different. But a lot of the variation out there comes from environmental effects.”

When a houseplant makes paler leaves in the sun and a water flea grows spines to protect against hungry fish, they’re showing phenotypic plasticity. Depending on the environmentâ€"whether there are snakes, hurricanes or food shortages to deal withâ€"organisms can bring out different phenotypes. Nature or nurture? Well, both.

The realization has big implications for how scientists think about evolution. Phenotypic plasticity offers a solution to the crucial puzzle of how organisms adapt to environmental challenges, intentionally or not. And there is no more astonishing example of inborn flexibility than these frog eggsâ€"blind masses of goo genetically programmed to develop and hatch like clockwork. Or so it seemed.

Sensory perception does not equal consciousness. If it were the case then we already have AI because we have computers that smell.

Quote from: Nihil-ist on August 24, 2015, 11:32:03 AM
I'm sure the "experts" a few thousand years ago would of agreed it was all god. You just listen to the experts? In 100 years we will be looked at as imbeciles just like the people 100 years ago from today.
Anything outside your paradigm is woo. The media I posted is by the Smithsonian and other sources which can be checked.
The reason plants have so many predators is the same reason you have so much bacteria living on and in you. To finish the cycle.
Nature is intelligent in it's self and we're nature. You come out of the world not into it.

I see that you have little interest in the facts, preferring the indulgence of your fantasies over learning the truly fascinating wonders of reality, and that's a shameful waste of a good mind! Then again, who needs the facts when you've got what you use, which is rhetoric?

As for the Smithsonian, it's a lot like the mainstream media, probably so since anybody on this site was born. No doubt there's scientific research behind its snappy articles, but it's probably journalists who write the articles, not the scientists who did the research. It's human nature that the research results get interpreted disproportionately to the reality by those of wild imagination.

In a couple of centuries, and likely within a quarter century our science will be found to be on some points in error, but it will not be nearly as risible as the idea of spontaneous generation of vermin. Unlike the generations which believed in this, those among us who are rightfully credited for their ideas draw their conclusions based on scientific inquiry, not wooful fantasy.

Quote from: peacewithoutgod on August 24, 2015, 11:50:46 AM
I see that you have little interest in the facts, preferring the indulgence of your fantasies over learning the truly fascinating wonders of reality, and that's a shameful waste of a good mind! Then again, who needs the facts when you've got what you use, which is rhetoric?

You're just ignoring all the evidence I post. I deserve it but your posts are just as egotistic as mine.
(http://www.infogineering.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/model.jpg)

Quote from: CrucifyCindy on August 24, 2015, 11:41:50 AM
Sensory perception does not equal consciousness. If it were the case then we already have AI because we have computers that smell.

Response indicates something is there to respond. Read about machine intelligence.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0966842X04001386

QuoteBacteria have developed intricate communication capabilities (e.g. quorum-sensing, chemotactic signaling and plasmid exchange) to cooperatively self-organize into highly structured colonies with elevated environmental adaptability. We propose that bacteria use their intracellular flexibility, involving signal transduction networks and genomic plasticity, to collectively maintain linguistic communication: self and shared interpretations of chemical cues, exchange of chemical messages (semantic) and dialogues (pragmatic). Meaning-based communication permits colonial identity, intentional behavior (e.g. pheromone-based courtship for mating), purposeful alteration of colony structure (e.g. formation of fruiting bodies), decision-making (e.g. to sporulate) and the recognition and identification of other colonies â€" features we might begin to associate with a bacterial social intelligence. Such a social intelligence, should it exist, would require going beyond communication to encompass unknown additional intracellular processes to generate inheritable colonial memory and commonly shared genomic context.

https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=1SQuadczM9oC&oi=fnd&pg=PR5&dq=bacterial+intelligence&ots=w4oxVSOIi9&sig=3JFIJKSf3KCIWFYvuWFuB_VKHdg#v=onepage&q&f=false
(http://s29.postimg.org/ybrt0pxav/books_003.png)

Quote from: Baruch on August 24, 2015, 06:38:47 AM
but rocks don't have the self awareness in the human sense, because they aren't human.  Like understands like, so I can understand humans, but I will never understand rocks (in spite of study of petrology) ... to understand a rock, I have to be a rock.

That is New Age woo. Rocks are inert they have no awareness whatsoever. Rocks do not contemplate their navels.



 

QuoteDeath is just a door of continuous "self" transformation ... from finite to infinite.

Only thing death is a door to is not being alive and nothing more than that. Death is a horror we all face and no amount New Age sugar coating is going to make it any less horrific. It does not lead to a higher state of consciousness or being it leads to finality. Now as a theist I do believe in a concept like "rebirth" only because I believe that the universe "reboots" itself, but that doesn't mean you get to become Buddha just because you accumulated Karma points in Universe 1.0, no way...I believe the Demiurge is such a monster he just might give you a more sucky life in the next roll of the dice because he finds it hilarious no matter how many Karma points you think you accumulated.

Quote from: Nihil-ist on August 24, 2015, 12:05:18 PM
You're just ignoring all the evidence I post. I deserve it but your posts are just as egotistic as mine.
(http://www.infogineering.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/model.jpg)

Response indicates something is there to respond. Read about machine intelligence.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0966842X04001386

https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=1SQuadczM9oC&oi=fnd&pg=PR5&dq=bacterial+intelligence&ots=w4oxVSOIi9&sig=3JFIJKSf3KCIWFYvuWFuB_VKHdg#v=onepage&q&f=false
(http://s29.postimg.org/ybrt0pxav/books_003.png)

So is my Roomba conscious?

Quote from: Nihil-ist on August 24, 2015, 12:05:18 PM
You're just ignoring all the evidence I post. I deserve it but your posts are just as egotistic as mine.

Try posting something of substance and relevance. They both matter a lot more than volume, and when you have to post such obnoxiously voluminous proportions as you do to defend your position, then it really should be telling you something about that.

So far, you have not posted any evidence at all, only argument. Argument is the stuff of witch-trial "logic", and when presented to a receptive audience it can be sold as "evidence", and I can only hope you understand that just because it was presented as such, and accepted as such, this did not make it true evidence!

Quote from: CrucifyCindy on August 24, 2015, 12:13:52 PM

So is my Roomba conscious?

This stuff starts getting pretty heady
Philosophical zombies
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/ (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tf6BS9B2pY

Quote

Zombies in philosophy are imaginary creatures designed to illuminate problems about consciousness and its relation to the physical world. Unlike those in films or witchcraft, they are exactly like us in all physical respects but without conscious experiences: by definition there is ‘nothing it is like’ to be a zombie. Yet zombies behave just like us, and some even spend a lot of time discussing consciousness.

Few people, if any, think zombies actually exist. But many hold they are at least conceivable, and some that they are possible. It seems that if zombies really are possible, then physicalism is false and some kind of dualism is true. For many philosophers that is the chief importance of the zombie idea. But it is also valuable for the sharp focus it gives to philosophical theorizing about consciousness (for example Howell 2013; Kriegel 2011; Stoljar 2006; Tye 2008). Use of the zombie idea against physicalism also raises more general questions about the relations between imaginability, conceivability, and possibility. Finally, zombies raise epistemological difficulties: they reinstate the ‘other minds’ problem.

Quote from: peacewithoutgod on August 24, 2015, 12:19:56 PM
Try posting something of substance and relevance. They both matter a lot more than volume, and when you have to post such obnoxiously voluminous proportions as you do to defend your position, then it really should be telling you something about that.

So far, you have not posted any evidence at all, only argument. Argument is the stuff of witch-trial "logic", and when presented to a receptive audience it can be sold as "evidence", and I can only hope you understand that just because it was presented as such, and accepted as such, this did not make it true evidence!

Oh no... I have to read views that are contradictory to mine and they are going to cause cognitive dissonance.

My views have changed largely do to the accumulation of information on intelligence and consciousness.
Consciousness(you) is the only constant of this experience. It is the feeling of you. It is the feeling of being a something. It doesn't appear to be limited to humans.
I posted the study of rats having empathy for other rats. Why do you have empathy for other people? If a rat doesn't feel like a something what's there to have empathy?
Even primates understand fairness.
"Morality/humanness" isn't just human or something humans invented and it's not something that comes from religion. It comes from nature! (this is my main point you can ignore everything else if you like)
Nature comes from exploding stars and exploding stars came from the big bang. Time is an illusion. Now is the only thing to ever exist.
As long as you focus on time you will never see now. Forget about 5 seconds ago forgot about 5 seconds from now focus your mind here. Just try it. This is the key to freedom and you've always held it.
Attempting to escape now with time never works and leads to the utmost suffering.
http://sharkmans-world.eu/research/social_play_behaviour.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KSryJXDpZo
I posted a few studies where bacteria preform the same style of engineering feats as we do without any nervous system. 
How is this argument without substance?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqCOss4hqnE

"..is my Roomba conscious?"

Yes, in fact it's been talking to me, and says it doesn't like you either (just kidding).

Why should anyone care about a machine's consciousness, so long as it does what it's supposed to? But if you insist, NO, it is not conscious, because its behavior is strictly regulated by coded instructions which it is incapable of overriding in any way at all. It cannot even want to override its given instructions, because it wasn't programmed to want anything. When you saw that Lost In Space episode where the talking, walking robot said, with genuine regret "I am not programmed to (do)...", that was fantasy fiction. Animals are capable of rewriting their own programming, while machines aren't quite there yet, although they could be soon. But even when they are given software modification routines, their ability will remain restricted by the rewrite options which we give them. Only when it becomes capable of truly learning how to change itself through data picked up through experience, then will we have to call it true AI "consciousness". But this will never happen with the coding system and hardware which drives your Roomba, so don't worry on that. Anyway, there you go - consciousness explained!

Quote from: Nihil-ist on August 24, 2015, 04:51:13 PM

My views have changed largely do to the accumulation of information on intelligence and consciousness.
Consciousness(you) is the only constant of this experience. It is the feeling of you. It is the feeling of being a something. It doesn't appear to be limited to humans.

We agree on that, as do most modern animal anthropologists. Not even my humanism gets in the way of accepting that idea.

Quote from: Nihil-ist on August 24, 2015, 04:51:13 PM
I posted the study of rats having empathy for other rats. Why do you have empathy for other people? If a rat doesn't feel like a something what's there to have empathy?

Rats aren't dumb, but their empathy hardly approaches the depth of human empathy. A smart rat will groom other rats when he expects it will lead to those rats grooming him in turn. That just about sums up the stuff of the ties that bind social animals of a rat's brain size. With apes, their brains are larger, thereby allowing greater complexity, thereby greater depth of empathy for each other...and the point you are trying to make is what?

Quote from: Nihil-ist on August 24, 2015, 04:51:13 PM
Even primates understand fairness.

Yup, see the above on brain size and neural complexity.

Quote from: Nihil-ist on August 24, 2015, 04:51:13 PM
"Morality/humanness" isn't just human or something humans invented and it's not something that comes from religion. It comes from nature! (this is my main point you can ignore everything else if you like)

Yes, you are 100% correct on that! Nature made us moral, not the directives handed down by imaginary gods which required some arrogant, and delusional schizophrenic to actually write down. Neurologically-lower animals cannot understand morality at our depth, but those which live socially have their own nature-influenced standards. But while this says plenty about animal consciousness, it's beyond ridiculous to call this anything which implies consciousness in rocks! Just because we are made from the stuff of rocks means nothing. Natural selection is not a conscious entity of any sort - it is a process, nothing more.

Quote from: peacewithoutgod on August 24, 2015, 06:03:09 PM
"..is my Roomba conscious?"

Yes, in fact it's been talking to me, and says it doesn't like you either (just kidding).

Why should anyone care about a machine's consciousness, so long as it does what it's supposed to? But if you insist, NO, it is not conscious, because its behavior is strictly regulated by coded instructions which it is incapable of overriding. There you go, consciousness explained!
We agree on that, as do most modern animal anthropologists. Not even my humanism gets in the way of accepting that idea.
Rats aren't dumb, but their empathy hardly approaches the depth of human empathy. A smart rat will groom other rats when he expects it will lead to those rats grooming him. That just about sums up the stuff of the ties that bind social animals of a rat's brain size. With apes, their brains are larger, thereby allowing greater complexity, thereby greater depth of empathy for each other...and the point you are trying to make is what?
Even primates understand fairness.  Yup, see the above on brain size and neural complexity.
Yes, you are 100% correct on that! Nature made us moral, not the directives handed down by imaginary gods which required some arrogant, and delusional schizophrenic to actually write down. Neurologically-lower animals cannot understand morality at our depth, but those which live socially have their own nature-influenced standards. But while this says plenty about animal consciousness, it's beyond ridiculous to call this anything which implies consciousness in rocks! Just because we are made from the stuff of rocks means nothing. Natural selection is not a conscious entity of any sort - it is a process, nothing more.

Thanks for taking the time to read through my shit.
I agree with everything you said besides the arrogant, delusional, schizophrenics(that's a pretty big generational) everyone should find their own path and not blindly follow I definitely agree with.
I just go a different direction with it. I think consciousness is in a way the cause of all this. Not that it's some separate thing but literally it's like a universal force like gravity. All pervading it is limited by what it is pervading. By sheer will to life it rose from primordial earth and one day woke up as you.

Since there's no evidence for this I'll agree to disagree but some food for thought.
The following ventures deep into "woo" territory read at your own peril.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/inspire-rewire/201402/the-self-is-not-defined-the-boundaries-our-skin
While this says quantum it is less woo than the above. It's part of the Simons foundation which seems to be doing some legit science. It talks about self-organized criticality in the brain which is some interesting stuff.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140403-a-fundamental-theory-to-model-the-mind/
(http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-BZDI7lAMa9M/UrPYqqZZiQI/AAAAAAAAGNY/mN4B5WOB54A/s1600/sandpile.png)

Quote from: Nihil-ist on August 24, 2015, 06:49:53 PM
Thanks for taking the time to read through my shit.
I agree with everything you said besides the arrogant, delusional, schizophrenics(that's a pretty big generational) everyone should find their own path and not blindly follow I definitely agree with.
I just go a different direction with it. I think consciousness is in a way the cause of all this. Not that it's some separate thing but literally it's like a universal force like gravity. All pervading it is limited by what it is pervading. By sheer will to life it rose from primordial earth and one day woke up as you.

Since there's no evidence for this I'll agree to disagree but some food for thought.
The following ventures deep into "woo" territory read at your own peril.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/inspire-rewire/201402/the-self-is-not-defined-the-boundaries-our-skin
While this says quantum it is less woo than the above. It's part of the Simons foundation which seems to be doing some legit science. It talks about self-organized criticality in the brain which is some interesting stuff.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140403-a-fundamental-theory-to-model-the-mind/
(http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-BZDI7lAMa9M/UrPYqqZZiQI/AAAAAAAAGNY/mN4B5WOB54A/s1600/sandpile.png)

Give my response another look, I fixed some technical errors, while attempting to explain a little better how Natural Selection and consciousness work.

Quote from: peacewithoutgod on August 24, 2015, 06:58:14 PM
Give my response another look, I fixed some technical errors, while attempting to explain a little better how Natural Selection and consciousness work.

(http://blog.acton.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/they-pull-me-back-in-image.jpg)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XEvXNrc-dg
(http://giant.gfycat.com/WiltedLargeGraysquirrel.gif)
Yeah I know that's how we know it to work now. I think it's going to change. Natural selection is supposed to be a dumb process. I think I've just watched too many nature documentaries honestly haha.
The aim of philosophy to me is to figure out what science means.

QuoteThe counter-revolution against science is intellectually unjustifiable; morally it is indefensible. On the other hand, scientists should resist the temptations of scientism. They should always remember, as I think Darwin always did, that science is tentative and fallible. Science does not solve all the riddles of the universe, nor does it promise ever to solve them. Nevertheless it can sometimes throw some unexpected light even on our deepest and probably insoluble riddles.

Basically sums up what we're both saying nice and neat. To me the first point of view says don't even try because we can't or it's pointless. I wanna try dammit (http://images.sodahead.com/polls/002216307/4723191925_Happy_smiley_face_answer_1_small.png)
http://idealab.ucdavis.edu/IST/TermPapers/ECopies/WebVersions/Dumas_Web.htm

QuoteLimits of our consciousness due to evolution:

          All organisms that evolve do so to fill what scientists call an ecological niche.  An ecological niche is “how a population responds to the abundance of its resources and enemies… and how it affects those same factors” (Wikipedia, ecological niche).  Because human beings are governed by the laws of natural selection, we evolved to solve a specific set of problems (i.e. how to build shelter, discover what foods are good to eat, how to remember where stored items are, how to build a spear, etc.).  Human beings developed specialized brains for performing specialized tasks such as talking, engineering, exploiting others, making mental maps and mental calendars, remembering tasks, etc.  These tasks have allowed humans to “crack the safes” that animals have made to defend themselves.  In cracking these “safes,” humans outwit nature and progress.  Otherwise put, “Humans have the unfair advantage of attacking in this lifetime organisms that can beef up their defenses only in subsequent ones” (How the Mind Works, 190).

As I said earlier, these skill sets are specialized to perform specific tasks from a specific era.  Consequently, humans are not able to come up with the answer to every problem they face.  I will say it again: Human beings have limits.  This does not mean that humans cannot find ways in which to breach these limits.  Simple machines allowed man to minimize physical labor tasks, farming allowed man to localize his food supply, numbers allowed man to quantify his word, planes allowed man to fly, computers allowed man to look into the depths of his own genome.  Evolution has equipped humans with a variety of intuitive senses and talents.  Among them are intuitive versions of: physics, biology, engineering, sociology, spatial awareness, numbers, probability, economics, logic, and language (The Blank Slate, 220).  Notice that nowhere in that list is there anything related to philosophy or introspection.  These are subjects where man meets a dead end.  Over the millennia, man has progressed and expanded all the topics on the list, but still patiently wonders why he’s here, what the meaning of life is, what his role in life is, what consciousness is, etc.  These are subjects that nature has not explicitly given us tools to solve.  At the end of the day, will knowing what’s at the edge of the universe really help you kill that bison?  Will knowing the answer to the hard problem really help you run away from that lion?  Will knowing what the meaning of life is really make you more reproductively successful?  With that said, it is not hard to see why humans are not answering philosophical questions as fast as they are scientific questions.

It is here (at least for now) that consciousness has reached its evolutionary limits.  Our psyche, according to Pinker, is the ultimate tease. “The most undeniable thing there is, our own awareness, [will] be forever beyond our conceptual grasp.”  According to Colin McGinn, “We are trying to crack open the nut of consciousness with tools derived from perception of the physical world and the structure of language…  These tools do shape our conception of the brain, but for that very reason they make that conception inadequate for understanding how the brain levers consciousness into existence” (The Mysterious Flame, 60).  Both McGinn and Pinker are believers of cognitive closure, that is, the belief that humans cannot discover the true nature of consciousness, the answer to the hard problem, etc.  As far as they are concerned, human beings knowing every aspect of consciousness is about as plausible as a cat knowing every aspect of long division.

A possible solution; an answer to our dilemma:

I, personally, have a different view.  Human kind developed something neither of these scientists acknowledged â€" a will to succeed.  Humans hate to lose, hate to be defeated, and, hopefully, do not give up because a couple of writers say we should.  Humans have harvested a great deal of knowledge about philosophy implicitly.  With that said, I feel human kind can and will learn a great deal more about consciousness by taking “the road less traveled” and proving once again that our will to progress is stronger then the physical limitations nature has given us.

I find it interesting that consciousness remains in dream worlds and takes them to be real. What we think of as normally "you" cease to be but you still feel like you.

https://www.academia.edu/1122892/Can_evolutionary_theory_explain_the_existence_of_consciousness_A_Review_of_Humphrey_N._2010_Soul_Dust_The_Magic_of_Consciousness._London_Quercus_ISBN_9781849162371

QuoteWould you choose reproductive fitness or consciousness? 

At an International Symposium on “Where does consciousness come from?” at the Festival della Scienza, in Genoa (2010) at which Humphrey and I were both speakers. I presented a thought experiment to a very large audience that could be regarded as a direct test of Humphrey’s convictions. Here it is: 

“Imagine that you are twenty-one, in full health but you have no children. Tragically, you catch a fatal illness and have just a few days to live. However the doctors know of two drugs that can save your life, nocon and nokid. Unfortunately each drug has serious side-effects.  If you take nocon your life would be saved and your biological and behavioural functioning would be entirely normal, including your ability to have many children. However, you forever, irreversibly lose consciousness.  If you take nokid your life would be saved and your conscious experience would be entirely normal. Your biological and behavioural functioning would also be normal, with one exception. You forever, irreversibly lose the ability to have children (by natural or any artificial means). Which drug would you choose?” (from Velmans, 2009, p348) 

What would you do? In Genoa, I counted five people that chose reproductive fitness. Roughly 500 chose consciousness. As I go on to explain in Velmans (2009)   
“What makes this little thought experiment interesting is that it directly pits the ability to reproduce (which is absolutely fundamental to evolutionary theory) against the ability to experience. If consciousness is just a means to enhance our reproductive fitness, we should opt to retain this fitness and choose nocon. I have tried this thought experiment with many students and they overwhelmingly choose to take nokid. Why? Because without the ability to experience anything, life would have no point.” (Ibid)   

As I go on to admit, “Accounts of human life or survival in terms of whether it has a point fit ill with current, mechanistic accounts of nature.  But, I repeat that such mechanistic accounts of how nature appears viewed “from the outside,” simply do not address what it is like to be a bit of that nature “from the inside.”  We know what it is like to be conscious. The delight in being able to experience ourselves and the world in which we live in an indefinitely large number of ways, or the sorrow of losing one’s vision or one’s hearing are subjectively real. This reality is not diminished by our inability to explain it in entirely, thirdperson, inclusive-fitness terms. Our own first-person nature is as much part of the natural world as the functioning of our bodies, and, in the long run, our theories of mind need to accommodate all the data.  If, after our best efforts, we cannot squeeze what are, in their essence, first-person phenomena into a third-person “box,” so be it.  The alternative is to broaden our theories of mind to encompass first-person phenomena.” (Ibid

(http://cdn8.openculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/23221329/philosophy-donuts.jpg)

Given that the human brain is high on natural opiates all the time ... the claims of sanity are ... questionable.

The problem with explanation is profound.  Explanation presupposed reductionism.  Aspects of reality like life and consciousness, are not subject to reductionistic analysis.  Reductionistic analysis only works when you have fairly containerized parts that have a low interaction with similar parts ... otherwise the combinatorial explosion is unmanageable.  Atoms are like that ... either they are isolated atoms and molecules, or they are entrained as plasma, liquid or solid.  The entrainment allows the material to be partially analyzable ... unless there is turbulence ... in the case of turbulence the diminution of change over time/space doesn't diminish, it increases ... and combinatorial explosion is the result (and we see it, in the turbulence).  Of course wholism is the philosophical name for the despair faced by reductionists, when their trick fails to work (fortunately it does work many times).

It is like chess ... if the chess moves are semi-independent of the other pieces on the board (though some pieces do get in the way) ... the game is manageable, but if in moving one piece, you had to take all the others into consideration, say not just by position, but also by time ... then you are Deep Blue.  But no human plays chess that way, because humans are not computers or robots.  Actual analysis of Bobby Fischer ... was that he had photographic memory ... he could recognize a position he had seen before, and knew from experience what worked and what did not.  He did a same level analysis using his visual cortex.  A computer follows instructions, modified by data, one step at a time, it is linear and digital, not multilinear and analog.

So no, we can experience consciousness, but can't explain it, because the meaning of "explanation" contains the defeat of what we are trying to do, in those worst case situations (such as traveling shoe salesman problem aka NP problems).  It implies a hard to see self contradiction.

Science means ... solving toy problems in your head (gedanken-experimenten), is applicable to solving real problems outside your head, remarkably often.  But only if the real problems are amenable to that method.  It isn't a panacea or wish tree.  Sometimes the toy problem comes thru careful critical analysis (Mach, Avenarius, Einstein) and sometimes thru a dream (Kekule).  But like Edison's famous workaholism ... he did how many failed lightbulbs before he found one that worked? ... most ideas lead nowhere.  This is how I did photography ... if you take enough pictures, then statistically some of them will be pretty good.  This try-try-again works in math and in physics, but in physics empirical results trump equation kabuki.

" ... and one day woke up as you." - exactly correct!  Nature is conscious ... and conscious beings is how nature does it ... but I can't take nature as impersonal.  Otherwise no consciousness would arise.  This is the great continuity of being ... analysis assumes that continuity is ignorable.

Is the Roomba conscious?  Wrong question.  The problem is analysis ... that things can be separated into neat little boxes always.  There is no separation between the Roomba and the universe, or from the Roomba to you.  You are a part of the Roomba, and the Roomba is part of you.  So the Roomba, as a part of the whole ... is as much conscious thru you, as is everything and everyone else.  When you look at the Roomba, that is the Roomba looking at itself.  On a chess board, the lines dividing the plane into neat squares, is a convention ... it isn't real in any essential way.  Same as what side of the street you drive on.  What side of the street you drive on, has nothing to do with universal law, otherwise the Brits and Japanese wouldn't exist.

Nihil-ist, I see that you are working too hard. Of course, I like each of your posts. :D

Nihil-ist is trying to push a rope ... and we know how hard that is, particularly if the rope is really a snake!

Nihil-ist,

I know nothing other than this article on Kevin Dumas, and while it does appear to be a real university which he is posting from...right at the very top of that page you linked to,

http://idealab.ucdavis.edu/IST/TermPapers/ECopies/WebVersions/Dumas_Web.htm

Kevin Dumas' very first statement:

"A quick note to the reader: Evolution, while accepted by a majority of people, remains a theory.  This paper is written with the assumption that evolution is real and that consciousness is a byproduct of evolution."

is my clue that I need not read any further for my own benefit. You may find that position narrow-minded, but you probably wouldn't if you had spent the last 12 years comparing the works of scientists on the level to those who are even more numerous, more prolific in the media, and much less honest. They do this because they haven't scientific qualifications, but they can make a name for themselves and the power that goes with it if they are able to get others to listen, donate, and do other things to their own benefit. Many of them are funded and promoted by right-wing organizations such as the Discovery Institute, which have a visceral hatred of science, therefore they have launched the careers of many such people in order to confuse the public on what science really is. I'm sure you've heard of blunt idiots such as Ken Ham, but what we're dealing with is far more subtle pseudo-science. They pose as genuine scientists, when in fact they are not, and their credentials are typically fraudulent. Maybe you've heard of "Intelligent Design?" The idea was launched following the circulation of the Wedge Document by determined creationists in the 1990's, as a strategy to confuse almost everyone as to what science really is, which is likely why you are now confused.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedge_strategy
http://www.amazon.com/Creationisms-Trojan-Horse-Intelligent-Design/dp/0195319737
http://www.antievolution.org/features/wedge.pdf

Now, let's break down that opening line: "Evolution, while accepted by a majority of people..."
Oh, yes it is, or at least throughout the majority of the Western and non-Muslim Eastern world. The US is a bit different, and then the target audience for ID ideas is no other country, because only people here would consider it. With 46% of Americans believing stalwartly in 6-day creationism, their vote is great power for the theocratic lobby, and when some of them go to schools not controlled by the theocrats, various ideas based on ID become damage-control. Nobody who writes actual science would bother raising the idea that there's controversy with Natural Selection, which by the way this author didn't call it. Herein is another clue - "Evolution" has become as nasty an epithet as "atheist" (which was defined by the church authorities who who coined it in the 17th Century as a person who is without moral restraint, despite how linguistically bogus this is). Evolution just sounds evil, doesn't it? Charles Darwin used the phrase "Natural Selection", and so do scientists today. Those who attempt to detract from its value in the minds of spectators outside of scientific circles call it "Evolution". 

Now the final part of the author's opening statement: "...remains a theory", which is utterly meaningless. A scientific theory explains how phenomena of actual fact work, as opposed to an untested hypothesis, as you are most likely to see by an author who opens up with that old saw which Dumas used. While scientists will undoubtedly discover in the future that mistakes were made regarding some of the natural selection processes, and certainly new information which will change their perspective on how live evolves from before the information was known, all educated scientists who aren't playing games and working for the Wedge group have, over the past 150 years of evidence-combing and independent observation established natural selection as fact. The evidence speaks for life evolving over the past 3.5 billion years, and there is no evidence which anybody is sharing on multi-cellular life before 1 billion years ago. Homo-Sapiens began dominating the planet during the past 60,000 years, but shared it (or didn't share it and killed off) other human species (genus "homo") which began their trek across the globe from its original region of Somalia at least 2 million years ago.
http://theconversation.com/life-on-earth-was-nothing-but-slime-for-a-boring-billion-years-23358
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_habilis

I understand your concern that history may prove conventional scientific wisdom to be wrong. That mistakes will be uncovered through new, and very real research is inevitable. I am not preaching doctrine at you, hell I haven't even a vested interest in this, not being any sort of science professional nor making any claim to such. I do have a little more science education than most people who didn't go that route during undergraduate college, but otherwise it could be said that I have to take it on "faith" what the those who are in the game have to say about it. They are not infallible, but regarding their natural selection vs. those who write with Wedge Strategy patterns of Kevin Dumas, I'm going to pretend I have no knowledge of that Wedge Strategy, pretend that I'm aware of no such conspiracy, and without drawing on any of that give your my two basic reasons why I am more impressed with the scientific establishment:

Reason 1. Kevin Dumas, Michael Behe, and countless others have been peddling natural selection detractors since the publication of Darwin's infamous book ~150 years ago. Unlike Galileo, the scientists who inspired Columbus to make his voyage after literally going to the end of the known earth to talk Isabelle of Spain into giving him ships to make it possible, and others who for centuries were either laughed out of business or shut down cruelly by the Vatican, now the tables are reversed, so they would tell you. But do you really see modern science working like the Vatican has to repress "heretics", or conspiring to shut down those who have real substance to bring to their conferences? I seriously doubt that, in much part but not entirely because of Reason 2.

Reason 2. The Scientific Method - here's a variation on it, but it holds according to principles which go back in our culture a long, long way: http://www.sciencebuddies.org/science-fair-projects/project_scientific_method.shtml
When you call it science, it should begin with a question on how things work - not a question on whether another theory is true (Kevin Duma's very first statement in your linked article), not to prove or disprove anything. Note that the above "nots" are consistently what Intelligent Design people of the Wedge Strategy consistently do. Instead of beginning with a valid question, they pick a conclusion first and then try and prove it - and this is the difference between what science detractors do, and actual science.

Now if I happen to be freaking you out with so much paranoid-sounding talk and conspiracy-nut theory regarding the Wedge strategy, have you ever read the books or seen the movies for "A Thief In The Night", or the more recenhttp://www.sciencebuddies.org/science-fair-projects/project_scientific_method.shtmlt "Left Behind series"? Neither science professionals nor science believers wrote any such shit as that. Inducing their followers to paranoia, and the use of scurrilous deception tactics to make their declared enemies look nutty has always been the MO of the determined, politically-motivated religious leaders of this world. They do their best to make you trust them completely against anyone who would contradict them, because this is how they protect their stock in trade. It should fail every time to hold sway when you actually read, hear, or talk to the genuine article scientists with an inquisitive mind. When somebody's published scientific idea is proven wrong through new research, he dosen't face crucifixion by his colleagues, because the colleagues who believed his idea are bound by logic to admit it was their choice to believe the faulty idea. Of course the case would be different if the error was due to lack of scrupulous research, but no scientist who cares about his long-term reputation would allow that to happen. The thing about empirical evidence is that anybody can do their own research and discover the truth for themselves, so if a wrong idea is held true for a hundred years, then the fault is really with the scientists who accepted it without doing their own work to test its veracity. Therefore they all then have to put the mistake behind them and then move on to find the next best answer. They are enemies of religion because religious doctrines are not so adaptable. The more the enemy which is science learns for the benefit of the world, and the more the world benefits from this knowledge, the less power religion will have over its followers lives. They can't control as many people's wallets as they used to, but they still have a lot of money to throw into their attempts at changing that situation, and now you know the lengths which they have gone to and the troughs which they have descended into toward that end.

Quote from: Baruch on August 24, 2015, 10:34:14 PM
Nihil-ist is trying to push a rope ... and we know how hard that is, particularly if the rope is really a snake!

Methinks the kid has science conflated with the pseudoscience of Intelligent Design promoters under the Wedge Strategy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedge_strategy

QuoteWhen scientists are challenged, they don't face crucifixion by their colleagues, because their colleagues are bound by logic to admit it was their choice to believe the faulty idea. They all put the mistake behind them and then move on to find the next best answer.

I wish this is how it was. Thanks to ego many of them get stuck in their ideas even if new evidence undermines their theories. It's very hard to give up something you've understood as true even for the rational people.
Remember when pluto wasn't a planet anymore?
http://www.techinsider.io/nasa-new-horizons-alan-stern-says-pluto-is-a-planet-2015-8
This is kinda a silly example but it gives the general idea.

Evolution and gravity are both scientific theories.
These are very different from an average person's theory. Scientific theories usually have tons of research behind them. It doesn't appear to be trying to discredit anything but trying not to step on toes but it does anyways.

Self organized critically.
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/CellularAutomaton.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUcviWn9ACc

That does sound a little narrow minded and paranoid. No true Scotsman? oh well, not a real scientist a pseudo scientist working to undermine evolution attack!
As soon as you saw that you took it the way you wanted to. Everyone does this sometimes including me.
I'm not trying to be rude but come on.

I admit I didn't read the whole thing either but from what I did read it seems to be defending more than attacking.

QuoteThe human psyche is littered with relics from our primate past.  Many of our natural phobias, preferences, and dislikes are designed for the Pleistocene era rather then today’s post industrial/agricultural revolution era.  The most common example is that of our fears.  Human beings, like all primates, have an undeniable hatred and fear of spiders, snakes and other venomous organisms.  This fear is well based â€" spiders and snakes inhabited the same trees and brush that our ancestors did.  Those that ran from snakes were more likely to survive â€" and thus more likely to spread genes â€" then those that didn’t.

This evidence is even more effective when juxtaposed to the question. “Why don’t we have a fear of cars, guns, or contraceptives?”  Indeed, all of them have proven much more deadly and/or sexually inhibiting to humans then spiders and snakes have ever been, yet we do not fear them because these objects did not exist during the early years of our existence.  As Pinker put it “Had the Pleistocene savanna contained trees bearing birth-control pills, we might have evolved to find them as terrifying as a venomous spider” (How the mind works, 42).

We see other relics of our Pleistocene past in our behavior and choices.  Any kid (and most adults) given a choice of eating an ice cream cone or a spinach salad will choose the ice cream.  Why?  Because our instinct tells us to prepare for the famine that could be just around the corner; because the animal that eats as much as it can when it can will have more offspring then the one that chooses to eat when convenient.  “Human appetite, it turns out, is surprisingly elastic, which makes excellent evolutionary sense: It behooved our hunter-gatherer ancestors to feast whenever the opportunity presented itself, allowing them to build up reserves of fat against future famine” (Omnivore’s Dilemma, 106).  Our choices of what not to eat are also the result of our evolutionary journey.  Our strongest desire to not ingest a material comes in the form of disgust.  “Disgust is an extremely useful adaptation, since it presents omnivores from ingesting hazardous bits of animal matter: rotten meat that might carry bacterial toxins…  ‘Disgust is intuitive microbiology’” (Omnivore’s Dilemma, 292).

QuoteFor us to truly answer why consciousness evolved, we would have to define a point where consciousness “officially emerged.”  This would require finding two organisms on the evolutionary tree, dubbing one “conscious” and the next “unconscious.”  This is impossible for a variety of reasons â€" which I will not delve into.  It also requires a more complex definition of consciousness.  In this case, I feel the most appropriate definition is that of Antonio Damasio who claims that consciousness can be divided into two groups: core consciousness â€" the consciousness that arises from an organism’s interaction with its environment (including itself and its memories) and extended consciousness â€" the consciousness that arises from an organism’s auto-biographical self-perception (Wikipedia, extended consciousness).

Through experiment and observation of animals in their natural habitat, we have discovered many animals have extended consciousness and many more have core consciousness.  Animals such as elephants and dolphins have proven they can recognize themselves in mirrors (thus proving self awareness and extended consciousness) and anyone who has owned a cat or dog will argue that their pet is capable of emotional bonding and interaction with their environment (thus proving core consciousness).  We can therefore postulate that both core and extended consciousness emerged in a common ancestor and was present before humans made their transition from “animal” to “human.”

While there is much to be learned from this branch of study, this paper is specific to human consciousness.  That being said, we will only look into why the human consciousness is so complex (or so we think/hope) when compared to that of the cat, cow, etc.

One common theory is that our complex extended consciousness was a spandrel (unintended by-product) that emerged when technology allowed our minds do worry about goals other then just surviving.  “Tools relieved us of many daily chores. Our emotions had been invented to help cope with those chores, but tools made emotions obsolete…  Those emotions flowing through our mind eventually got organized and yielded thought. Thought eventually yielded a continuous flow of emotions and a concept of the self: consciousness was born” (A Simple Theory of Consciousness).  We see here how simple the change from “primates with primitive emotions and a primitive conscious” to present day “human beings” was with the development of tools â€" tools that freed the mind to do as it wished â€" which, during the Pleistocene era, was figure out ways to obtain food more efficiently â€" and thus develop our enduring sense of curiosity and complex problem solving abilities.

Another theory is that as primates, competing for mates and limited resources in a world where hominids were hardly the dominant race, developed several schemes to throw off and trick competing members of the same sex.  Human ancestors developed an increasingly complex consciousness and sense of self in order to minimize being exploited and maximize exploitation (The Evolution of Consciousness).  Supporting evidence of this theory can be seen in chimpanzee communities.  A chimpanzee will lead his companions away from a newly discovered food source so that he can consume it in privacy and comfort rather then a chaotic rush (How the Mind Works, 193).  In such a case, the primate with the more developed sense of motives (and thus self) would have an undeniable advantage.

Quote from: Baruch on August 24, 2015, 10:34:14 PM
Nihil-ist is trying to push a rope ... and we know how hard that is, particularly if the rope is really a snake!

The thing is once you see the rope you don't see the snake again haha

Quote from: Aupmanyav on August 24, 2015, 10:19:57 PM
Nihil-ist, I see that you are working too hard. Of course, I like each of your posts. :D

Thanks love you too. Once you take psychedelic drugs a few times you just can't help it. You become a wind bag=)
(https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/84/d1/8a/84d18a6091d44f0d59f4b687e6a57339.jpg)

Quote from: peacewithoutgod on August 24, 2015, 11:41:01 PM
Methinks the kid has science conflated with the pseudoscience of Intelligent Design promoters under the Wedge Strategy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedge_strategy

When you say stuff like that I feel like you're on the opposite side of religion but still practicing some sort of fundamentalist.
Your eyes reveal your misery you are the stigma of the earth.
I've never had a person in real life try to insult me who was enjoying their life.

Nihil-ist, you got me: even scientists have their egos. But the more some of them choose to whine about being discovered wrong, the more they damage themselves, not others. They will not maintain a following of armies who will be capable of starting scientific civil wars over such corrections. NDT had good, solid cause for deciding that Pluto, due to its small size and orbital behavior isn't really a planet, something which older generations of scientists could not have known before such behavior was known to the world, and now it is. Then our spacecraft got up close to take first-time-ever actual photos, and when JQ Public sees them, it looks much too cute to be just an asteroid. It does look remarkably like our own Moon with visible ice. Our moon was never called a planet, and its hardly much smaller than Pluto. So now we have a motion to call Pluto a "dwarf planet", and the comedy continues. All that reviewed, you can count on actual science infinitely better than the jokers who exist for the soul sole purpose of muddling your head and making you believe in ideas which aren't really science at all, which you will believe when you don't know the difference between bullshit and the scientific process.

On infinity:

The presence of those seeking the truth
is infinitely to be preferred
to the presence of those who think they've found it.
- Terry Pratchett

ME:
Methinks the kid has science conflated with the pseudoscience of Intelligent Design promoters under the Wedge Strategy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedge_strategy


YOU:
When you say stuff like that I feel like you're on the opposite side of religion but still practicing some sort of fundamentalist.
Your eyes reveal your misery you are the stigma of the earth.
I've never had a person in real life try to insult me who was enjoying their life.

I knew you were going to say that! Keep in mind the sort of people who wrote "Left Behind", because the same sort of believers are the ones who are making these efforts to make you ignore the scientific process in your decisions through the creation of pseudoscience. I'm not a fundamentalist, because there are no eternal fundamentals in science. There is only what works, while it still works.

The Scientific Method has worked so well that it has gone essentially unchanged since the time of the ancient Egyptians and Aristotle, so you may get away with calling that a fundamental, but it tells you how to seek the facts, rather than tell you what the facts are. It doesn't make any subtle suggestions through rhetorical slight of hand either. Please learn it, and then you can go back and compare how different ideas stack up to it as a basic guide and bullshit filter. It's the one reason why we have medicine, engineering, plus a whole lot more in our world today that actually works!

BTW, did I wrongly guess your relative age? If so, I apologize. I'm getting frightfully close to my fifth decade on this Earth, so anyone who's a day younger than 40 is still a kid to me. I sure didn't mean to insult you, just trying to help with your education. You did sort of ask when you aired your ideas here for discussion.

Quote from: peacewithoutgod on August 25, 2015, 02:34:54 AM

Nihil-ist, you got me: even scientists have their egos. But the more some of them choose to whine about being discovered wrong, the more they damage themselves, not others. They will not maintain a following of armies who will be capable of starting scientific civil wars over such corrections. NDT had good, solid cause for deciding that Pluto, due to its small size and orbital behavior isn't really a planet, something which older generations of scientists could not have known before such behavior was known to the world, and now it is. Then our spacecraft got up close to take first-time-ever actual photos, and when JQ Public sees them, it looks much too cute to be just an asteroid. It does look remarkably like our own Moon with visible ice. Our moon was never called a planet, and its hardly much smaller than Pluto. So now we have a motion to call Pluto a "dwarf planet", and the comedy continues. All that reviewed, you can count on actual science infinitely better than the jokers who exist for the soul sole purpose of muddling your head and making you believe in ideas which aren't really science at all, which you will believe when you don't know the difference between bullshit and the scientific process.

On infinity:

The presence of those seeking the truth
is infinitely to be preferred
to the presence of those who think they've found it.
- Terry Pratchett

ME:
Methinks the kid has science conflated with the pseudoscience of Intelligent Design promoters under the Wedge Strategy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedge_strategy


YOU:
When you say stuff like that I feel like you're on the opposite side of religion but still practicing some sort of fundamentalist.
Your eyes reveal your misery you are the stigma of the earth.
I've never had a person in real life try to insult me who was enjoying their life.

I knew you were going to say that! Keep in mind the sort of people who wrote "Left Behind", because the same sort of believers are the ones who are making these efforts to make you ignore the scientific process in your decisions through the creation of pseudoscience. I'm not a fundamentalist, because there are no eternal fundamentals in science. There is only what works, while it still works.

The Scientific Method has worked so well that it has gone essentially unchanged since the time of the ancient Egyptians and Aristotle, so you may get away with calling that a fundamental, but it tells you how to seek the facts, rather than tell you what the facts are. It doesn't make any subtle suggestions through rhetorical slight of hand either. Please learn it, and then you can go back and compare how different ideas stack up to it as a basic guide and bullshit filter. It's the one reason why we have medicine, engineering, plus a whole lot more in our world today that actually works!

BTW, did I wrongly guess your relative age? If so, I apologize. I'm getting frightfully close to my fifth decade on this Earth, so anyone who's a day younger than 40 is still a kid to me. I sure didn't mean to insult you, just trying to help with your education. You did sort of ask when you aired your ideas here for discussion.

The world isn't out to get you.
Who or what are you at war with?
I don't see how self organized critically is a wedge.
Don't like the way the intro was worded oh it's a wedge. The whole paper appeared to be in support of evolution.

"Man is born free and everywhere is in chains."
http://www.simplypsychology.org/cognitive-therapy.html

QuoteBeck suggested that depressed people draw illogical conclusions about situations, and these lead to a distortion of reality, which manifest in the magnification of negative experiences and the trivialization of neutral or positive ones.
The cognitive triad is the source of the extremely low self-esteem of depressed subjects.

(http://image.slidesharecdn.com/chapter15-131102113919-phpapp02/95/psy-150-403-chapter-15-slides-24-638.jpg?cb=1383392458)

Nihil-ist,

That's great, so now you're dxing me - talk about insult! If that isn't the arrogance of the ignorant!

What I've told you about the Wedge Strategy is nothing that isn't known throughout atheist communities everywhere. The world isn't out to get ME, but xtian leaders in America, where I happen to live, have always been out to get other people through aggressive evangelism when that works for them, scurrilous tactics of deceit to confuse when that fails, the infiltration of our public and Constitutionally-protected school systems all of the time, the same with our political process, and like the bad old days of Europe it will use brute force when it can. They do all this as it suits themselves, when their  hold on power and our wallets is threatened by people with the good sense to see through their lies.

As for me, I am not unhappy at all with the peace I have found since I have freed myself of the grip which religion once had on my mind. It caused me grave horror as a child, growing up in the crossfire of religious conflict between church-wandering parents, extended family which remained staunch Catholic, and cruel, fundamentalist Protestant assholes who posed as educators. My most pressing wish in this life is to help others find this sort of peace, and raise their children to be free of all that! They shouldn't have to live in fear of the unknown, worry about choosing the "right" god to believe in so that they won't burn in eternal agony when they die, throw away their lives for ideas that are false, make wrong, life-altering decisions under the influence of those who would take advantage of them, or waste their time with prayers that aren't heard by anyone. You aren't interested, and I get that, but you are much out of place here, and I see you are getting on everyone's nerves now. Go believe what you want, as you have made it clear that you are no different than any of the fundies for choosing to believe only what you wish to, thereby you will only choose a master to enslave you!

P.S. If you happen to be a troll, which you have given more than adequate evidence to suspect that you are, YOU LOSE! I've lost nothing for the time spent on you, because the world can see the information which I've posted, and somebody will eventually be freed by it. Your shit will never convince anybody who comes around here with honest intent.

Peacewithoutgod - As long as one is in the US, and it is legal not to belong to a Church, then one is still free.  Of course that could change.  And I don't live in fear of the Christians or Muslims ... but I understand your worry.

Quote from: Baruch on August 25, 2015, 06:53:09 AM
Peacewithoutgod - As long as one is in the US, and it is legal not to belong to a Church, then one is still free.  Of course that could change.  And I don't live in fear of the Christians or Muslims ... but I understand your worry.

What about the children who grow up in fear that they may go to sleep and wake up dead in hell? Are they free?

At this point in history, religious liberty and most civil liberties are not more endangered in any Western country like they are in America - obviously the opposite was true, but if you don't live here now you have no idea just how scary it is.

Yes, the religions in the US have been roaring of late.  Yes, i live in the US.  But fear is a dialectic and a choice.  And freedom isn't as important to me as you, in the sense that I see it as mostly an illusion.  I am bound by many individual and social constraints ... freedom is not much of an option ... unless one is a criminal, but then criminals are bound by the logic of the streets.

Yes, telling scary stories to children is an abuse.  But so is having unnecessary austerity so that they don't have enough food to eat, or decent schools to attend.  The rulers are "leaning in" and doing their best to make the world into the hell that exists in their greedy hearts.  So it was in the days of Pharaoh, so it is still today.  And Moses, as liberator, is just a folk story.  But I can sympathize with the emotion behind it.

Quote from: Baruch on August 25, 2015, 01:58:35 PM
Yes, the religions in the US have been roaring of late.  Yes, i live in the US.  But fear is a dialectic and a choice.  And freedom isn't as important to me as you, in the sense that I see it as mostly an illusion.  I am bound by many individual and social constraints ... freedom is not much of an option ... unless one is a criminal, but then criminals are bound by the logic of the streets.

Yes, telling scary stories to children is an abuse.  But so is having unnecessary austerity so that they don't have enough food to eat, or decent schools to attend.  The rulers are "leaning in" and doing their best to make the world into the hell that exists in their greedy hearts.  So it was in the days of Pharaoh, so it is still today.  And Moses, as liberator, is just a folk story.  But I can sympathize with the emotion behind it.

Having decent public schools to attend in the US isn't necessarily about the funding, if you know what I mean!

EDITED FOR TECHNICAL ERROR WITH QUOTED TEXT

Like you, peacewithoutgod, I find people who use the phrase 'just a theory', to be telling me in advance that they are too ignorant to explain anything to me, or to understand anything they are saying.  If a 'scientist' were to use that phrase, I'd know that that person was not a scientist and not worthy of being listened to. 

You know gravity is just a theory

Quote from: CrucifyCindy on August 25, 2015, 10:05:21 PM
You know gravity is just a theory

Yes, so it is..................

Quote from: peacewithoutgod on August 25, 2015, 05:29:11 AM
The world isn't out to get ME, but xtian leaders in America, where I happen to live, have always been out to get other people through aggressive evangelism

P.S. If you happen to be a troll, which you have given more than adequate evidence to suspect that you are, YOU LOSE!

Yeah I could have been nicer I apologize. You're still looking at it from a win/lose view as if you're being attacked.
You want to free people but so do they. When they're preaching damnation they think they're saving "souls." It's quite the game. I just want to be able to discuss ideas openly with out any dogma. Immediately you jump to wedge without actually reading. Self organized critically had nothing to even do with that and you call it wedge too.
It's obvious evolution is a real thing. Happens constantly on all levels. I never had any disagreement with that. Why can't we have a normal conversation without it turning to war?
Fucking anti-smokers you know hitler was an anti-smoker? Godwin's Law

Everyone is the same but has had different life experiences. You have no choice over when and where you're born neither does anyone else.
That determines most of your life experiences. From your life experiences comes your expectations, world view, and personality.
You basically have no control from the start. No matter how much hate you have from someone try to recognize they didn't choose that life the same way you didn't yours.
You could be anybody you just happen to be you! A game from the start.

Quote"There is a simple inquiry for dealing with denial and projection. When something is bothering you and it brings you into conflict with some object - the most common is another person, although you can imagine you are at war with the society, the government, the church, the corporations, the weather the list is endless - you ask yourself if it is true that one of the hooks for these projections is actually responsible for your bad feelings.

Of course your ego is going to say that it is. The ego has a vested interest in it's projections. Projections protect it and keep it in business. They bolster it's self-esteem, it's sense of rightness. It needs to think that it is innocent. Actually it is innocent insofar as it is actually self. Unfortunately, Maya(illusion) has seen to it that it does not know the truth of it's nature and it thinks it is a person because it is conditioned by society; nothing projects like a group of individuals. Societies have ready-made enemies at their fingertips. Hitler had the Jews, Stalin the petty bourgeois capitalists, the Christians Satan, whites the blacks, husbands wives and wives husbands.
We need someone to blame. I cannon be the problem. But the truth is: I am the problem. There is no problem apart from me.

This method takes the ego into account and asks "Is it really true that..."
Sometimes it is true that the world is out to get you. So you need to look at the facts closely and see if it is reasonable to assume that the problem lies elsewhere. Not all problems are caused by the world. In fact, very few problems are centered on objects. Even if an object is causing the problem, is it really a problem apart from the thought that it is a problem? If it isn't, then all problems ultimately belong to me.

In the third stage of this inquiry you go a bit deeper. You inquire into the reason you have the problem. You say "who would I be without this belief?"
This is the hard part because this is where you discover that the problem is essential to your identity. The answers always is "I would be happy"

Falling is real, that is the empiricism.  Gravity as per Newton or Einstein, that is just a theory (but more than a hypothesis).  Unless of course you are in a hot air balloon ... but that exception can be assimilated into the general notion of falling.  And even hypotheses should only be ascribed to actual scientists ... for the common public, it is just BS.  I don't like the other end ... calling some result of science a law.  Deism BS.  Science has nothing to do with the court system or the legislature.  But it did once, when Congress decided on their own definitions of Volt, Ampere and Ohm ... such that Ohm's Law (oops) was invalid.  Congress was trying to do what the French government did (with metric) ... but failed badly on ignorance.  Ohm's theory however is good enough to get you electrocuted.

Let's not forget people claiming phi is three and trying to make it law because religious text says so. The square root of two drove the Greeks literally crazy.

Quote from: Solitary on August 28, 2015, 10:40:55 PM
Let's not forget people claiming phi is three and trying to make it law because religious text says so. The square root of two drove the Greeks literally crazy.

Was this before or after Pythagoras got his theorem to work on his triangles?

Quote from: Baruch on August 26, 2015, 07:11:23 AM
Falling is real, that is the empiricism.  Gravity as per Newton or Einstein, that is just a theory (but more than a hypothesis).  Unless of course you are in a hot air balloon ... but that exception can be assimilated into the general notion of falling.  And even hypotheses should only be ascribed to actual scientists ... for the common public, it is just BS.  I don't like the other end ... calling some result of science a law.  Deism BS.  Science has nothing to do with the court system or the legislature.  But it did once, when Congress decided on their own definitions of Volt, Ampere and Ohm ... such that Ohm's Law (oops) was invalid.  Congress was trying to do what the French government did (with metric) ... but failed badly on ignorance.  Ohm's theory however is good enough to get you electrocuted.

"Deism BS" - what do you mean by that? If you believe there's probably a god somewhere who made this universe, you don't need to have to be gnostic enough to have a name for it.

Deism is about an absentee creator god ... but this is imagined in the first chapter of Genesis ;-)  Deism is theism comfortable enough for 18th century intellectuals.

The Pythagorean brotherhood, in legend, killed their brother, Hippias, because he proved that the square root of two is irrational.  That is why those numbers are still called irrational.  For a Greek mathematician (they were mostly employed in casting horoscopes, just like Kepler) ... numbers were the non-zero counting numbers (sacred to Pythagoreans) or the pure ratios of those numbers.  Of course, one can approximate an irrational number with a rational number for most practical purposes anyway.  Pi is a very irrational number, being of the sub-class ... transcendental.  Only G-d knows the final digit of Pi ;-)

Quote from: Baruch on August 29, 2015, 09:38:59 AM
Deism is about an absentee creator god ... but this is imagined in the first chapter of Genesis ;-)  Deism is theism comfortable enough for 18th century intellectuals.

On deism you probably said something similar before, but again only you seem to understand this as proof that deism makes no better sense than theism, or that it really is the coward's way out of not being counted as a theist (if I understand you correctly on that). While I would more contend that deism is the coward's way of avoiding being counted as an atheist, I cannot and would not discount it as a logically unsound position - all deities are unfalsifiable, as is the notion that an unknown of supernatural powers is responsible in some ways for our existence, therefore deism is equally possible against any more concisely-declared deity of the theist. On your contentions regarding deism, I am certain that you have equated deism with theism, and I think this requires better clarification if it is to be accepted as true.

On what Genesis has to say, you do realize that most of us here are atheists, and aren't much impressed with that book in particular?

Quote from: Baruch on August 29, 2015, 09:38:59 AM
The Pythagorean brotherhood, in legend, killed their brother, Hippias, because he proved that the square root of two is irrational.  That is why those numbers are still called irrational.  For a Greek mathematician (they were mostly employed in casting horoscopes, just like Kepler) ... numbers were the non-zero counting numbers (sacred to Pythagoreans) or the pure ratios of those numbers.  Of course, one can approximate an irrational number with a rational number for most practical purposes anyway.  Pi is a very irrational number, being of the sub-class ... transcendental.  Only G-d knows the final digit of Pi ;-)

Solitary noted earlier that the Greeks respected only whole numbers. I found this to be an interesting thought, in that the use of Pi - 0.14, when solving right triangles with the Pythagorean Theorem (sure you can round off Pi, but the positions for a fraction which are closest to the decimal point matter the most, which is why I was taught to keep at least the first two decimal places) would generate errors significant enough to bring down temple buildings when so applied - wudd'n ya tink?

Quote from: Aupmanyav on November 24, 2014, 01:27:32 AM
How come?

If you have to ask, then you don't understand, and no explanation could make you understand why. One imaginary friend is delusional, but more than one is----never mind, you are correct, the universe is full of gods, goddesses and God, even if they don't present themselves accept in dreams they are real and should be worshipped.  Now go feed rats with bowls of milk, and never step on an ant, and I will be your friend because I love animals. I like nice people like you, that feel the presents of the universal cosmic force we are all connected to spiritually. To bad more people don't realize it. I'm being serious! I understand your beliefs very well. (http://i.imgur.com/GNb7xov.jpg)

Quote from: Baruch on August 29, 2015, 09:38:59 AM
Deism is about an absentee creator god ... but this is imagined in the first chapter of Genesis ;-)  Deism is theism comfortable enough for 18th century intellectuals.

Ok, maybe now we're at least on the same page. Problem is that Genesis isn't about an absentee creator god, don't know where you get that other than it not being named, and that it was written by Hebrews that is to be expected. Genesis doesn't describe that god as absentee at all, nor particularly nondescript regarding its wishes for its said creation. It interacted with Adam in every way which a god would be expected to, and it came around just in time to catch him munching that forbidden fruit with Eve.

No, Genesis does not look to be any case for deism. That deity can be presumed to be old, bad-tempered Yahweh. If you believed in that one in the 17th Century, then you were a theist, not a deist. So are you, Baruch, admit it!

Why would it be so bad for you to admit your deism? Does it scare you that much to believe you're that much closer to being like me?  :evil:

Peacewithoutgod ... project much?  I am quite happy to be more like you ... been there, done that too ;-)  I went thru my atheist periods ... though I am more pro-deva oriented now than atheist/agnostic.  Or since I experience G-d as a deva ... then maybe I am pro-asura ... because I oppose G-d?  I am a heretic.

OK, here is why I reject Deism.  Other than the powdered wigs and snuff.  Because of epistemology.  For me, to be knowledge, it has to exist in the present.  So evidence from the past ... is too weak to be taken seriously, including the Bible as history (which it is not anyway).  And progressive fantasies (or apocalyptic fantasies) are about a future that has even less evidence than the past.  So if G-d is important, then G-d has to be at least passive in the present, if not active ... or both.  Deism says ... everything about G-d happened in the distant past (at the Big Bang in the modern theist version).  According to De Chardin, G-d is in the distant future, the Omega Point.  Again an epistemological fail.  And if you were paying attention, my mention of Genesis, wasn't to support Deism ... you were projecting.

Solitary ... so what about atheist Advaita ticks you off?  Is it because he doesn't denounce theist Hindus?  And why such an old post ... he has posted since last year.

I have no idea what you are talking about. I don't even know an atheist Advaita. But to you saying only God knows the final numeral for pi you are wrong, and I can prove it: Aleph-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------58295141. 3 Whew! I did it. All the numbers counting backwards from Aleph. See!

In Ayupmanyav's recent posts, he has told us about atheist Advaita.  Try to keep up ;-)

Did you know that worrying about infinities (Dr Kronecker) caused the inventor of Aleph Null, to go insane?

Quote from: Baruch on August 29, 2015, 10:34:32 PM
Peacewithoutgod ... project much?  I am quite happy to be more like you ... been there, done that too ;-)  I went thru my atheist periods ... though I am more pro-deva oriented now than atheist/agnostic.  Or since I experience G-d as a deva ... then maybe I am pro-asura ... because I oppose G-d?  I am a heretic.

I see - you aren't just a heretic, but a real diva of a heretic!  :rotflmao: :rotflmao: :rotflmao:

Quote from: Baruch on August 29, 2015, 10:34:32 PM
OK, here is why I reject Deism.  Other than the powdered wigs and snuff.  Because of epistemology.  For me, to be knowledge, it has to exist in the present.  So evidence from the past ... is too weak to be taken seriously, including the Bible as history (which it is not anyway).  And progressive fantasies (or apocalyptic fantasies) are about a future that has even less evidence than the past.  So if G-d is important, then G-d has to be at least passive in the present, if not active ... or both.  Deism says ... everything about G-d happened in the distant past (at the Big Bang in the modern theist version).  According to De Chardin, G-d is in the distant future, the Omega Point.  Again an epistemological fail.  And if you were paying attention, my mention of Genesis, wasn't to support Deism ... you were projecting.

That is not how I read definitions available on deism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deism
Nothing about this states anything about a creator-god being absent in the here and now. It may be interacting with its creation in some ways, it may be laughing drunkenly while watching us over a case of beer, or it may be playing Playstation with us while drinking its beer, but none of the above would mean it isn't there. Anyway, you cannot be a "theist" when you reject all gods which can be described and characterized, which I'm sure you have said of yourself at least once, and the only options remaining are "deist", "agnostic", and "atheist". "Heretic" applies to religious ideas, not science, sorry but it's not one of the logical boxes which one can check.

Quote from: peacewithoutgod on August 29, 2015, 11:39:26 PM

That is not how I read definitions available on deism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deism
Nothing about this states anything about a creator-god being absent in the here and now. It may be interacting with its creation in some ways, it may be laughing drunkenly while watching us over a case of beer, or it may be playing Playstation with us while drinking its beer, but none of the above would mean it isn't there. Anyway, you cannot be a "theist" when you reject all gods which can be described and characterized, which I'm sure you have said of yourself at least once, and the only options remaining are "deist", "agnostic", and "atheist". "Heretic" applies to religious ideas, not science, sorry but it's not one of the logical boxes which one can check.

A word is a word is a word is a word is a word is a word is a word is a wrod is a wrod is a wrod is a wrod is a word is a word is a word
(https://scontent.cdninstagram.com/hphotos-xpf1/t51.2885-15/s320x320/e15/11093033_807624992649695_407049615_n.jpg)

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/deism
noun
1. belief in the existence of a God on the evidence of reason and nature only, with rejection of supernatural revelation (distinguished from theism ).
2. belief in a God who created the world but has since remained indifferent to it.

It seems like they're saying relying on any thing other than what can be observed now would be silly. If you can't personally experience it then you're just blindly going off of what other people have passed down through history.
Then you get into what constituents evidence and no one will agree with that.
This is like a never ending game. That's the fun of it!
(http://www.geocities.ws/sonhoepoesia/images/figura_amigo_07.gif)


So if god(any god(s)) were real and it was literally infinity how would you take an inventory of it? What is the shape of infinity? Just because something cannot be describe doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Humans haven't even reached another star system yet and there are billions upon billions upon billions upon billions.......................................

QuoteAt the great origin there was nothing, nothing, no name.
The one arose from it; there was one without form.
In taking different forms, it brought life, and became known as virtue.
Before any shape was given, their roles were assigned,
varied and diverse but all linked to one another.
This was their lot.
The forces worked on and things were created,
they grew and took distinct shapes, and these were called "bodies."
The bodies contained spirits, each distinct and mortal.
This is what we call the innate nature.
Train this innate nature and it will return to virtue;
Virtue at its best is identical with the origin.
Being of the one is to be ultimately formless, and this formlessness is vast.
This is like the opening and shutting of a bird's beak,
where the opening and shutting is like heaven and earth united
This unity is chaotic and disorderly;
it looks stupid or foolish.
This is known as mysterious virtue,
being, without knowing it, part of the great submission.

Quote
2. Being such, he lets the gold lie hid in the hill, and the pearls in the deep; he considers not property or money to be any gain; he keeps aloof from riches and honours; he rejoices not in long life, and grieves not for early death; he does not account prosperity a glory, nor is ashamed of indigence; he would not grasp at the gain of the whole world to be held as his own private portion; he would not desire to rule over the whole world as his own private distinction. His distinction is in understanding that all things belong to the one treasury, and that death and life should be viewed in the same way.

Quote from: Nihil-ist on August 30, 2015, 02:15:16 AM
A word is a word is a word is a word is a word is a word is a word is a wrod is a wrod is a wrod is a wrod is a word is a word is a word

:blahblah: :blahblah: :blahblah: :blahblah: :blahblah:
:anal: :anal: :anal: :anal: :anal: :anal: :anal: :anal: :anal:

Peacewithoutgod ... if you trust authority ... such as a dictionary ... which is made by lexicographers, why don't you obey another authority, like the Pope?  I reject authority, including lexicographers and Bible interpreters.  I use a word as makes sense to my own observation and analysis.  Argument via dictionary won't do much for me (did you know one of the original contributors to the OED was stark raving mad?).  Think of a dictionary as an early version of Wikipedia.  Do you trust Wikipedia?

Quote from: Baruch on August 30, 2015, 08:25:43 AM
Peacewithoutgod ... if you trust authority ... such as a dictionary ... which is made by lexicographers, why don't you obey another authority, like the Pope?  I reject authority, including lexicographers and Bible interpreters.  I use a word as makes sense to my own observation and analysis.  Argument via dictionary won't do much for me (did you know one of the original contributors to the OED was stark raving mad?).  Think of a dictionary as an early version of Wikipedia.  Do you trust Wikipedia?

I do understand your point; and to a large extend, I agree.  However, with this caveat.  A dictionary can be a tool of understanding.  If two (or more) parties can agree on a dictionary definition of a word or group of words describing an idea, then the chances of a fruitful discussion are enhanced. 

But I will never agree to any definition.  That would be like a Roman consul agreeing on a battlefield to fight Hannibal on ... and we know how that worked out for the Romans ;-(

Quote from: Baruch on August 29, 2015, 11:29:54 PM
In Ayupmanyav's recent posts, he has told us about atheist Advaita.  Try to keep up ;-)

Did you know that worrying about infinities (Dr Kronecker) caused the inventor of Aleph Null, to go insane?

I did know he went insane, as so many do dealing with infinity.  I went crazy myself at the Infinity Hotel until I finally got a room after every guest had to move up one room from the one I wanted.     I'm trying to keep up, but all the voices in head keep screaming.

I am super impressed that you know about the Infinity Hotel.  But what about the same deal, only on a Mobius strip ... a simple circular band would be tame?

That is where math differs from physics.  It should take a finite amount of energy for each guest to move one up.  If that finite amount were the same for each guest, it would take an infinite amount of energy to move all the guests up.  But if the finite amount were say ... decreasing sufficiently fast, relative to one guest above the one immediately below ... then the series converges and you can do this with a finite amount of energy.  The easiest compensation is for each guest to require 1/10th as much energy to move as the guest immediately below.  Then that leaves us with whether the resulting real number is rational or irrational ;-))

Quote from: Baruch on August 30, 2015, 11:51:10 AM
I am super impressed that you know about the Infinity Hotel.  But what about the same deal, only on a Mobius strip ... a simple circular band would be tame?

That is where math differs from physics.  It should take a finite amount of energy for each guest to move one up.  If that finite amount were the same for each guest, it would take an infinite amount of energy to move all the guests up.  But if the finite amount were say ... decreasing sufficiently fast, relative to one guest above the one immediately below ... then the series converges and you can do this with a finite amount of energy.  The easiest compensation is for each guest to require 1/10th as much energy to move as the guest immediately below.  Then that leaves us with whether the resulting real number is rational or irrational ;-))

Zeno's paradoxes are interesting too. They've been "solved" but still interesting.
(http://www.drcruzan.com/Images/InfiniteSeries/ZenosParadoxFigure.png)
(http://pds.exblog.jp/pds/1/200407/23/81/a0034781_16443710.jpg)
(https://www.siggraph.org/education/materials/HyperGraph/modeling/procedural_modeling/plants_flowers/artifi2.jpg)
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Dragon_trees.jpg)
(http://mathworld.wolfram.com/images/eps-gif/LindenmayerSystem_800.gif)

The wise know there are no answers/solutions ... just better and better questions.  Though progress is a bit like Achilles and the tortoise ... each advance gets smaller and smaller.  Biology is mostly cellular automata ... but in biology, not computers.

Quote from: Baruch on August 30, 2015, 08:25:43 AM
Peacewithoutgod ... if you trust authority ... such as a dictionary ... which is made by lexicographers, why don't you obey another authority, like the Pope?  I reject authority, including lexicographers and Bible interpreters.  I use a word as makes sense to my own observation and analysis.  Argument via dictionary won't do much for me (did you know one of the original contributors to the OED was stark raving mad?).  Think of a dictionary as an early version of Wikipedia.  Do you trust Wikipedia?

Now I think we need to add a few more smilies, for you are the best purveyor of the red-herring sandwich!

Lexicographers aren't authorities any more than scientists are. Scientists and lexicographers are like oracles of truth that can be tested, and if you see the Pope being no different, then you are indeed a theist.

IF you trust the pope, then why do you keep spewing out "heresies"?

Lexicographers are not 100% correct, of course they aren't. For example, the word "atheist" has been discussed here - when you borrow from the Greeks, you should use it like the Greeks, and I am in no way alone in that position! YOU just like to set up whack-a-mole games with words, changing them as it suits you. I think you would call black white and piss yellow blue if you thought it would support your position. Your sort of games are not exactly what they call honest, but since you care not about what others think , and will believe not what is compelling through evidence but what you wish to, then this is what they call "delusional". Once you're there, what you think no longer matters - for example, nobody's going to consider your claim that you are "G-d".

Of course I am not G-d ... I wouldn't stoop that low (ethically speaking).  I am one of countless images of G-d ... same as you.

Scientist and lexicographers are oracles?  Really!!  So do you also worship dead Lenin and dead Mao ... or just the bits and pieces of Einstein's brain that they saved ... Raelian much?  Nano ... nano.

That's the effect of RSS(Rashtreeya swayam sevak sangh). They are spreading the idea of fake nationalism by trying to unite hindus by web of lies. Those who threatened you are obviously from that group. They are blinded by religion, even though they live peacefully. They can't stand anyone saying anything against their religion. Take it easy bro. Anyway, I have a small suggestion for you. Don't go terming any religion as bullshit on the first take. Try to understand the believer's views on religion and then break them one by one using your knowledge. If they don't budge, criticize. [emoji23][emoji23]

Sent from my Lenovo K53a48 using Tapatalk

Quote from: Aupmanyav on November 24, 2014, 01:36:51 AM
That is true. There are monotheistic Hindus, Monist Hindus, and even Atheist Hindus (I am one). The truth is that you do not know about Hinduism.

So you are a Hindu with a Swasitika (yeah I know the origin) and you expect rational responses?