Spirits and other incorporial things

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Because by definition "thoughts" are the product of thinking. Thinking is a function of the brain. The brain consist of organic material. If there is something in the universe that can think without a brain then that would fly in the face of all known science and knowlege.

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OK. You can't think without a brain. Up to that point I am in full agreement with you. It is the definition of the brain that I am disagreeing on.I fail to see why it must be organic. Computers think, even though they aren't self aware (yet).
Why can't we have a field of focused energy with nodes that are able to act as parts of a neural network? I know that is beyond today's science but that doesn't make it impossible.
Maybe it is possible to make a structure from dark matter. Maybe it will be able to thnk in some way.I have no idea if this is happening already in some part of the universe or whether we just have to wait for science to get us to that point. As I have said before, there is a whole lot more that we don't know than there is that we do know so any conclusions we reach now are going to be erronious as they are based on incomplete information. Hence the reason that Science deals in theories rather than absolutes. You can adapt a theory as more information comes to light but if you try to stick to an absolute then you are in fact following a religion.PYThis message has been edited by PurpleYouko, 11-19-2004 01:05 PM

Yes you could say computers think. But they still consist of matter. They still are subject to the laws of physics. Ok, a field of focused energy. what is focusing it? And what is generating the energy? And what are these nodes? What do they consist of? And these nodes that are part of a neural network do they exist as non-matter? Maybe we can build a machine out of nothing that exist as nothing but functions as a brain and can be intelligent.(Silly) How can one build 'something' that does not exist in the form of matter. Thats like saying I can draw a triangle with 4 sides. Umm Purple Youko, what have you been smoking? What exactly do you know about dark matter? Dark matter has not been found to exist. It is postulated. And when and if man finds out that dark matter does exist what does that have to do with spirits and non corporal entities? Just because something exist outside of the bounds of science does not mean we can assume that it can explain our superstitions. That is called God of the Gaps mentality. Wrong. Just because a theory is based on incomplete infomation does not make it in error. A theory is based on evidence, as more evidence comes to light the theory is likewise re-evaluated taking the new evidence into consideration. Science does not jump to conclusions. Jumping to conclusions is psuedoscience. The fact that humans do not know all the answers does not mean we can not make hypothesis based on what we do know. Like the theory of evolution; just because science does not know 'all' the answers does not explain away the momentous amount of evidence and data that supports the theory currently. *edit misquote.This message has been edited by 1.61803, 11-19-2004 02:04 PM

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"One is punished most for ones virtues" Fredrick Neitzche

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Wrong. Just because a theory is based on incomplete infomation does not make it in error

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Depends on how much error is involved. If a theory is based on most of the known facts (you obviously can't base it on unknown facts or it is just a suggestion as I have been making), then you have a mostly accurate theory. Anything not 100% accurate is, by definition, in error to some degree.
Since no science that I am aware of has the audacity to claim that it is 100% correct and has no room whatsoever for improvement, advancement or whatever then I stick by my statement that they are in error to some degree. Beyond that it is just a question of terminology.

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Umm Purple Youko, what have you been smoking? What exactly do you know about dark matter? Dark matter has not been found to exist

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What do I know about dark matter?
Only what I have read in scientific journals. In other words bugger all. Just like everybody else from what I can gather.I am just throwing possibilities around to get people thinking. I never claimed to know how a non-corporeal brain made of dark matter, energy or neutrinos could think or how it can pass through walls and move furniture in my bedroom from one place to another in complete silence while I go into the next room to retreive a book.

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Ok, a field of focused energy. what is focusing it? And what is generating the energy? And what are these nodes? What do they consist of? And these nodes that are part of a neural network do they exist as non-matter?

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How the heck should I know? I just made a suggestion. Maybe somewhere down the line, someone much smarter than me will figure out how to do it. In the mean time I will just sit back and watch with an open mind until somebody proves whether it can be done or not. After all, it wasn't so long ago that people thought that going to the moon was ridiculous.PY

By the same token, it may be that spiritual existence is important for some men to deny because, due to their wickedness, the possibility of receiving recompense for their sins is too bleak.

Accuracy can be subjective. I can have 3 darts within the bullseye and one just outside the bull, were my darts accurate? The fact that they did not all hit the bull make them inaccurate? The first thing they teach you in physics class is something called significant figures. A calculation is only as good as its least significant figure. Just because we can not calculate Pi out to it's last decimal place does not mean the calculations we do make are "in error". I believe you know the point I am making and are arguing symantics. You said that because man does not know all of the facts that the "conclusions" we now have are "erroneous". All I was saying is that scientific methodology does not make conclusions. And theories are not deemed erroneous because of incomplete information.
The fact that we do not know all the answers does not mean we should invent phenomenon to explain reality, in my opinion.
Your are correct it was once thought impossible to fly and now we do so on a regular basis. But how much advancement in knowlege would humans have if we decided to explain everything that goes bump in the night as something supernatural and beyond our understanding? I am not one to say xyz will never happen, I am saying if xyz happens there will be an explanation that will correlate with the known body of knowlege and that it will be testable, verifyable and reproducable. If not then it will be dubbed bullshit.

Good point. But even the most graceous man such as the Dali Lamma or Ghandi will burn in hell according to Babtist Christian theology. But Hitler spared so long as he ask for forgivness and accepts Jesus. So much for that statement. It is not by deeds that one will be "saved" but by the acceptance of Christ.
Hence only Christians will be spared eternal suffering. Since that is a arrogant stance that smacks of "us against them" attitudes, I can see why many do not believe it. Not to mention the fact that humans have no control over where they will be born and what country, or culture or religion. Your whole salvations is hinged on the randomness of where you are from. Thats just silly.

I think that perhaps because you misunderstand salvation (Have you read the bible?) that you are against Christianity.Your quote above demonstrates to me that you have not read the bible.

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I believe you know the point I am making and are arguing symantics.

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Absolutely! Y' got me bang t' right guvn'r. Course I know the point. Just like I know that pi to the nth decimal is going to give me exactly the same answer as pi to 10 decimals when I calculate the diameter of a circle to 3 significant figures.

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I am not one to say xyz will never happen, I am saying if xyz happens there will be an explanation that will correlate with the known body of knowlege and that it will be testable, verifyable and reproducable. If not then it will be dubbed bullshit.

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I am in perfect agreement with you here. My point is that when something happens that science hasn't yet progressed far enough to be able to test, it is still dubbed bullshit by a lot of people who should know better.If the particular thing that happens is in a field of science that doesn't yet exist (and I'm sure there are plenty of those) then there is no body of knowledge that directly relates to the problem. Unless postulations are put forward and rigorously tested by scientists who are genuinely willing to learn, then we will never be able to advance an explanation of the phenomenon as a scientific theory.In short, don't just write something off as mumbo jumbo without first exploring the possibilities that maybe it isn't. Prove an alternative explanation for the event is what actually happened and then you can quite legitimately dub it bullshit.Advancing a postulation like "maybe he was sexually abused and created a fantasy realm to retreat into" is really just inventing a fictitious scenario to explain away what science cannot presently understand. At best it is denial and at worst it is hypocritical science hiding in a little box and denying that anything exists beyond it.I know that in the earlier post, it wasn't advanced as an actual suggestion that that is what happened but it worries me considerably that some scientists would rather beleive this kind of thing than to really look at the universe with a completely open mind.PY

Off topic. Buuuutttt.....Yes I have read the Bible, But do I misunderstand it or salvation? hmmm...well concidering that the church changed it's stance on grace and salvation and who can recieve it. Yes I do misunderstand. I will give you that. I also misunderstand the concept of the trinity, I also misunderstand the concept of transustantiation, I do not understand the concept of sins, venial, grave or otherwise. I do not understand the concept of hell, purgutory or otherwise. I do not understand the bibles redactions and contradictions. I do not understand the churches redactions and contradictions. I do not understand the infallability of the Pope. I do not understand the babtist concept of rapture. I do not understand the paradox of evil in the presence of a omnipotent benevolent God. I do not understand the concept of a angel of intellect making a dumb decision to rebel against God. I do not understand why people insist that it all should not be understood, simply accepted and not questioned. So your right dpardo I do not understand. Which is why I do not subscribe to your particular religion. It makes no sense to me any longer. But if it makes sense to you and you understand it I say fantastic!!

Yeah, but that kind of mental dissociation happens. It's been the explanation for plenty of other phenomenon. On the other hand, "ghosts" has never turned out to be the explanation for anything.So, I think you're being unfair. I agree that these sort of psychological suppositions are largely ad-hoc; but it's certainly better than inventing an entire system of supernatural spirits that can somehow affect the natural world without a physical presence, all based on one mysterious occurance.Like, I saw a TV show the other day where, in a lighthouse that was supposed to be haunted, they were able to film a metal chair move, on it's own, in fits and starts across a totally level floor. There was only one door into the room and a researcher who had just left that room (and had been sitting on the chair) was able to verify that nobody had gone past him, and the camera could see both the door and the chair.There was nobody there to move the chair, and it moved on its own. Why? They said "ghosts." I say, it was a metal chair, in a lighthouse with enormous electric power use. Could magnetic fields have moved the chair? I don't know. But developing an entire theory of ghosts and spectres from one hopping chair is just ridiculous.To sum up, we just need to feel free to say "I don't know" a little more often. If ghosts exist, we would have found them by now. Plenty of scientists and science-minded folk have died, some presumably in gruesome, ghost-forming ways. How come they don't help us solve this mystery from beyond the grave? Surely they realize they're in a position to do so.

Tisk tisk...and I thought you were from the "show me state." First off Proof is a function of mathmatics.
But I will play....***something goes bump in the other room***
1. was it something physical like a cat.
2. was it a spirit or a ghost
Ok...how can I assume it is something physical and not something supernatural? Well the supernatural flys is the face of all known bodies of science. A cat does not. Look up
Parsamonious Razor . I can dub something as bullshit if it flys in the face of the physical laws of nature. If on the other hand it is backed up by evidence and can be verified I am forced to accept the premise. Unfortunatley all claims of the supernatural have been as of 19Nov04 not adequateley supported by verifiable evidence and hence dubbed bullshit. But if you have some evidence to support claims of spirits and ghost feel free to provide a link or a paper or documentation that has been examined by a impartial independant board of scientist. And verified. In other words "show me".

Then I am pleased you are here in this forum as it seems that, with so many knowledge-seekers here, we can all put our minds together on any subject and try to understand it.

Hi Crashfrog.

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Yeah, but that kind of mental dissociation happens. It's been the explanation for plenty of other phenomenon. On the other hand, "ghosts" has never turned out to be the explanation for anything.

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Sure it happens, sometimes, but I think that it is also used as an excuse when nothing else fits.

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So, I think you're being unfair. I agree that these sort of psychological suppositions are largely ad-hoc; but it's certainly better than inventing an entire system of supernatural spirits that can somehow affect the natural world without a physical presence, all based on one mysterious occurance.

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Why is it better? I have asked this before. It seems to me that both possibilities are exactly that. Possibilities. What we want here is the truth. How can the assumption of one truth be better than another truth? There is only one real truth. Which one is it? or maybe its a third option that nobody has even thought of yet.Based on one incident? How about based on thousands of incidents? In my personal experience alone I have witnessed that many. Some may have been imagined. I don't deny that. Others may have become exagerated and warped in my less-than-perfect memory but there have been too many thing that have happened in too consistent a fashion to just dismiss it all without an alternative explanation that I can actually buy into.

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Could magnetic fields have moved the chair? I don't know. But developing an entire theory of ghosts and spectres from one hopping chair is just ridiculous.

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Perfectly good postulation. It should also have occurred to the investigators. (wonder if it did? it is kind of obvious after all.) The point is that a postulation like this could easily have been proved by directly measuring the magnetic fields in the lighthouse. I assume that they didn't do so or at least that they didn't report the results.
This seems like a case exactly the same as the ones I have repeatedly referred to before. The investigators are guilty of not examining all the possible explanations before settling on one that they went into the experiment attempting to prove. i.e. Ghosts rather than some other rational explanation.Why is it that both sides of an arguement like this keep distorting or ignoring all the facts. These people either deliberately fudged the result of the experiment by deliberate omision of tests that could have debunked their theory or more likely found exactly what they beleived they would find due to a biased attitude. The test was patently unscientific and only adds ammo to those who love nothing more than to dubb this kind of thing "bullshit".

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To sum up, we just need to feel free to say "I don't know" a little more often. If ghosts exist, we would have found them by now. Plenty of scientists and science-minded folk have died, some presumably in gruesome, ghost-forming ways. How come they don't help us solve this mystery from beyond the grave? Surely they realize they're in a position to do so.

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Again, I don't know. It actually feels good to say that sometimes doesn't it?
And please note that I have never, at any time, claimed that "ghosts", "spirits" or whatever kept messing up my house had anything to do with dead people. Frankly I see no reason or evidence to connect these strange goings on with some kind of left over remains of somebody who died. That really would be inventing something for the sake of it.All I contend is that something happened repeatedly and over a very long period of time, that cannot be explained by present day science. The same kind of thing has been happening repeatedly all over the world to all kinds of people and places for as long as records have been kept and presumably before that also.I have no idea what it is but I would love to find out.Does anyone have any rational explanations for any of it?PY

Yeah, and what I'm saying is, it's a better excuse than ghosts. Way better. While sometimes we posit psychological disease where there is no other evidence of it, psychological disease has very often turned out to be a legitimate explanation. That's never been the case with ghosts, so when given the choice to explain via psychology or via ghosts, we choose psychology every time. And I answered it. It's better because it's been right more often. "Ghosts" has bever been right. Most likely? Not ghosts. That's my point. "Ghosts" is not likely to be the explanation for these things. Unfortunately, the plural of "anecdote" is not "data." But it's not the same kind of thing. It's all kinds of different things, from chills and sensations of cold to bizzare almost-voices in radio static to objects appearing in strange places to outright visual manifestations.My dad teaches theatre at a state university in my hometown. His theatre is haunted, like all theatres. Their ghost manifests itself as a pair of boots. By dad swears that the ghost is real, but at the end of the day, all the reason he has to believe this is somebody's abandoned boots.

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1. was it something physical like a cat.

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I am refering to one incident among many here but let's play along to "something goes bump in the other room"1 The room in question has only one door, a locked window and no cat's, dogs, people playing pranks, or other animals.2 The other room that I went to led directly from the first one. Anyone entering the first would have had to walk pretty much through me to reach it.3 Cats are not normally capable of moving a bed up against a door that only opens inward, such that I had to push the bed away by forcing the door open.

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2. was it a spirit or a ghostUnfortunatley all claims of the supernatural have been as of 19Nov04 not adequateley supported by verifiable evidence and hence dubbed bullshit.

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Unfortunately this is just the historical response of people that are stuck in their ways. Surely a more reasonable answer would be to say. "I don't know how to explain this. I will look into it and let you know what I find out." Then you can just agree to call it "unexplained by present day science" and move on to something that you actually can prove one way or the other. Why can't anyone just admit that science doesn't know all the answers yet? Maybe in a hundred years or so, science will know all about the "supernatural" stuff of today. Maybe they will manipulate it to power their faster-than-light spacecraft. Maybe they will look back on this era and think about all the scientists who refused to accept what has become mainstream science to them, and laugh their heads off.Then again maybe they will have proved by that time that it is and always has been "bullshit".I just want someone who actually knows the answer to tell it to me. I think I am going to have a loooonng wait.PY