At what point should we look for a non-materialistic explanation?

Goodmorning Lyx2NO, If we equivocate "non-materialistic" as super natural then I would say I agree with you. However, in my opinion there is NOTHING that exist in nature that is supernatural. The fact that it exist means it is natural in my opinion. And if this is so then it seems reasonable to conclude that if something exist that is non-material then it is natural too.Humans have yet to discover the origin of the fundamental forces, from whence energy came into being, or how recreate life from non life. Why there is stuff,(Higgs).There may be nonmaterlistic explanations yet to be discovered. Hogwash you say? Fine you may be right, I may be crazy, Oh but it just may be a lunatic your looking for!!!! Why not go the whole enchilada?

You could as well assert that scientologists will require us to worship the image of L. Ron Hubbard, and it would be equally well supported by the Bible.Respectfully,-Meldinoor

Assuming you mean "equate", your "however" seems to be a case of eating your cake and keeping it too. "The fact that it exist" What exactly is "it" in this sentence? If it's generic never mind, but it looks more to me as if you're saying magic exists so by definition it isn't supernatural.What would a non-material (non-physical, magical) cause look like?I suspect that a non-material cause would fail to meet certain expectation of the natural world. Force would unrelated to acceleration, stress would be unrelated to strain, temperature would be unrelated to heat, ghosts can walk through wall but not fall through floors, etc.If I'm standing on a scale while my mind lifts a table does it affect the reading? Does my mind have to exert more effort to lift a car? Can my mind lift a car at one meter, but only a table at 10 meters? Can my mind make a cup of soup without simultaneously making a bucket of ice?If my mind has to make material trade-offs I'd assume a materialistic explanation will ensue eventually.If my mind does not have to make material trade-offs I'd be at a lose as to how one could possibly discover a materialistic explanation.We have yet to discover any effect that didn't make trade-offs. Until we do non-materialistic explanations are a non-starter. Because so far I've only been able to examine 110^-270 of the Universe. I want to hold off until I get to 110^-268.Edited by lyx2no, : Typo.

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The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those it cannot break, it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these, you can be sure that it will kill you too, but there will be no special hurry.

Sorry to poof out on you, but I agree with this. It only took about a week. But I finally see your point. Well played sir.

Hey Dave, how's it goin'? Likely? What are you basing this likelihood on?The anesthesiologist didn't mention anything like that. And you can't even breathe on your own when under general anesthesia, let alone hear stuff. The only thing I found after searching was people claiming some hearing loss after general anesthesia. I don't find your scenario very likely, nor reasonable, at all.But we know, a priori, that it couldn't have been an out of body experience, right? Your scenario is just a post hoc rationalization for materialism, isn't it?In all honesty, we just don't know how it/what happened. Insufficient data. But it must have been something that could be explained materialistically, right? Shouldn't that count as pseudo-skepticism?People say things like 'the model works' or 'the coin always comes up heads', but in this case we don't know what side the coin has landed on (its still in the air). Still though, you've offered a post hoc material rationalization and given it a positive likelihood. But by the nature of this case, we cannot perform a scientific investigation (what are we gonna do? flat-line people on purpose and control the variables ) so we just don't know. But people still come up with these off the cuff 'explanations' and maintain that there's no reason to look for a non-materialistic one. Seems dubious to me. But he is unable to investigate all possible explanations. This (specific) case can't really mature any more. The general case of out of body experiences is still in the air. But the surgeon is commenting on this specific case. What I said was:

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I think that was a legitimate place for the surgeon to look for a non-materialistic explanation.

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And I still think it is. The phenomenon seemed to defy materialistic explanation and my criteria for looking to the non-materialistic was this:

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I say we look for a non-materialistic explanation when current theory is violated.

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I think I've maintained my position. I think you're close here... The non-materialistic explanation is left as just a possibility, but it doesn't mean that we have to completely give up on learning the truth. The surgeon could meet with other ones who have had patients claim out of body experiences and they could look for correlations or commonalities, etc. I'm ignoring all the ID stuff we agree on and applying this line (admittedly out of context) to the case I've brought forward. I think further investigation does not have to be halted just because a non-materialistic explanation has been presented.There's even a research foundation for the phenomenon: OBERF - Out of Body Experience Research FoundationAren't they performing "further investigation"? (I haven't really looked into that website much)

From previous nuerons firing, which come from previous nuerons firing, which goes all the way back to the first firing in utero when the brain develops. And that first firing, I suppose, comes from the mother's nuerons firing. That's all fine and dandy.Now, back to this robot arm. Can you see now that in this specific case it is all material?

"Ascetically pleasing"? What a concept! I love it! Kinda like "religiously open-minded" or "faithfully apostate"...(Of course, the original article was actually talking about "aesthetically pleasing", which is something else semantically, orthographically and even phonetically. It's an amusing accident of language history that "aesthetic" and "ascetic" are nonetheless confusable despite their differences. Your confusion has provided me with an especially delicious oxymoron. Thank you.)Edited by Otto Tellick, : (added emoticon)

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autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.

Anesthesiology is not an exact science and maintaining the correct dosage can be tricky. Patients have been known to wake up in the middle of a surgery -- not a common occurance, but it has happened. There are also cases of patients regaining consciousness during a surgery but still being paralyzed so that they were powerless to signal anyone that they could feel everything being done to them.Also, there have been other cases mentioned in which patients could repeat things that were said during the surgery while they were out. That would indicate that the sense of hearing does indeed still work while we are unconscious; the only question would be whether the brain is able to process and store that sensory input.Now, please consider this inexplicable event. Several times in dance classes or at dances, my partner (whom I had seen before, since you end up seeing a lot of the same people at different events) would ask why my wife or girl friend hadn't come there with me. Since I have neither, I couldn't understand whom she was talking about. So I would try to find out more, but couldn't get any answers. I was wondering who this mysterious woman could be, someone whom everybody else kept seeing with me but of whom I was not the least bit aware. Finally, I mentioned it to a friend and she explained to me that it's a sneaky trick that women will use to determine a man's relationship status. There was no mysterious woman.Similarly, what the patient thought had happened (the surgeon doing the "chicken dance") might not have been based on any actual events, but was either dreamed or hallucinated by the patient. It was the surgeon himself who, taking the patient's question seriously, assumed that the patient had to have seen how he'd have to point to things with his elbow. Mentalists and psychics do the same thing all the time, leaving it up to their clients to make the associations between vague images and their own lives. No, the two scenarios I've offered are to demonstrate that there are possible explanations that had not been explored and that therefore jumping to a non-materialistic explanation was premature and unjustified. A more thorough investigation would have to have been conducted before just throwing up his hands -- er, his elbows -- and giving up and blaming it all on ghosties.You see, I have an explicable phenomenon right here in my own condo. For days I've been trying to find my father's SeaBee cruise book, but I can't find it. I don't know what has happened to it, so you would want me to jump to a non-materialistic explanation. OK. Obviously, it was stolen by the troll that lives in the basement under my condo that that basement is where the book is. Unfortunately, since my condo is built on a slab, that basement is also non-materialistic and so I am unable to gain entry to retrieve that book.OK, now that I know what happened to that book, I just have to give up ever finding it. I can now stop looking. Especially not in those boxes in the corner that I hadn't checked yet. Thank you very much!Or maybe I should look inside those boxes.The other day, I started thinking about the ID and creationist approach of finding in every mystery the answer of goddidit! Just think if we all adopted that approach. Murder mysteries on TV and in the movies would no longer last 1 to 2 hours. The moment the detectives hit a point where they couldn't think of how the murder was committed, then they would just throw up their hands and say "Goddidit!" Those shows wouldn't even last long enough to get to the first commercial break. And if the real homicide detectives were to employ the same techniques! In almost every homicide case, the answer would be immediately known, "Goddidit!", and they could close the case right on the spot. Their entire backlog of cases would be eliminated. In these hard financial times, that means that we would no longer have to fund police efforts, saving us a lot of money. And since all previous murder cases had wrongly convicted all those people, we could release them from prison, bringing the prison population down and allowing us to stop spending so much on prisons. What a God-send -- quite literally! And the old mysteries, like who really killed Kennedy, would be solved with a swift "Goddidit!"As long as a mystery remains, it needs to be solved. Blaming it all on gods and ghosties just will not cut it, because resorting to the wrong explanation, whether materialistic or non-materialistic, before arriving at the correct explanation will just keep us from ever solving that mystery. The big difference between a materialistic wrong explanation and a non-materialistic one is that you can at least later test and reject the materialistic one, whereas there is simply no way to test the non-materialistic one. That is why a non-materialistic explanation is quite literally giving up forever.Now, with OBEs and NDEs, there does appear to be something happening. If there is interest in investigating such phenomena, then there should be research into it, rather than just giving up and attributing it all to "ghosties".For example, there was "der Kluge Hans" ("Clever Hans"), a horse whose owner had taught to perform arithmetic. The owner would write the problem on a slate and show it to Hans, who would clop out the answer with his hoof. And Hans was right, every time! Everybody who saw it was amazed, except for one man who realized what was really going on and through a few simple experiments, he verified his hypothesis. Without knowing it, the owner was giving Hans the answer each and every time. Whenever he presented a new problem to Hans, he would look expectantly at Hans, who would start clopping and then would stop the moment his owner appeared satisfied. That is why we now conduct double-blind experiments, so that an experimenter in the know can't unintentionally influence the subject's actions.The point there is that what appears to be going on might not be what's really going on -- it looked like the horse was doing arithmetic, whereas Hans was only clever about reading his owner's body language. The people presenting OBE and NDE stories see them as evidence for such events, whereas what's actually happening is likely something else -- eg, something really interesting having to do with brain chemistry and activity as it's starting to shut down. So by jumping immediately to the non-material non-explanation, you (plural) are giving up on ever learning the truth. And I say that your statement is so incredibly wrong.When a theory is found to be wrong, then the last thing we would ever want to do would be to jump immediately to a non-materialistic explanation. If rejecting science every time that any theory was found to be wrong were Standing Operating Procedure (SOP), then we would have plunged back into abject ignorance and superstition a few centuries ago.For one thing, very few theories are complete and perfect (personally, I would say that none of them are, but I didn't want be make an absolutist statement). Test any theory rigourously enough and under extreme-enough conditions and you will find problems. Which is a good thing, because it's only by testing a theory that we do find where it fails. And we want to know where a theory fails so that we can correct it. It's an iterative process (if you've had any computer science, then you would know about iterative approximation methods). We work out an explanation of how something works, a conceptual model. Then we test it and find where it has some problems. Then we correct those problems and test it again. And again, and again, correcting and refining the theory each time with each new problem showing us where we need to direct our research. And as some scientists' research shows them a different explanation, then a new theory is developed and undergoes the same process of testing and refinement.Competing theories can and do exist at the same time. For one thing, the new theory that eventually wins out can start out inferior to the older, more refined theory. The Ptolemaic geocentric system had had centuries to be refined; every time it was found to be off, they just added some more epicycles and fixed it right up. The Copernican heliocentric system, the newcomer, made more sense, but it suffered serious problems. Like the Ptolemaic system, Copernicus assumed circular orbits (perhaps in part because the Church taught that had to be the case), which made it decidedly less accurate at predicting planetary positions. Whereas you would have thrown heliocentrism out immediately and opted for bringing back the angels moving the planets around (hey, that's the non-materialistic explanation for the solar system, isn't it?), that was not SOP. Instead, astronomers continued to work with the system and made their observations and tried to work it out. Inheriting the observations of Mars by his boss, Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler used them to develop his Three Laws of Planetary Motion, the first of which made the most fundamental correction to the Copernican system: the planets' orbits are not circular, but rather elliptical. That is what finally brought about the replacement of the Ptolemaic system by the Copernican, since until Kepler could make that principal correction the Ptolemaic system still served well and continued to be used even though it had a strong contender.Corrected and refined, the Copernican system has worked extremely well for us. However, in the early 19th century, it was found to be in error. Or rather, in predicting the positions of Uranus, observations showed those predictions to be wrong. The theory had been violated! Now, you would demand that we immediately look for a non-materialistic explanation! What, an angel got a DUI? But fortunately, you had no say in the matter. Astronomers hypothesized that there was another planet beyond Uranus and calculated where it should be. Then when they looked on 23 Sep 1846, that's where they found it. Whereas you would have just thrown the theory out, they applied it and found the correct materialistic explanation for the violation of the theory.Oh, another question: when you abandon a scientific theory and jump onto a non-materialistic explanation, how do you know which one to use? How can you tell which non-materialistic explanation explains that which you don't even understand? And how can you test when later events violate that non-materialistic explanation, which would then prompt you to jump to yet another non-materialistic explanation. Though that could never happen because you could never possibly test the first non-materialistic explanation. In fact, the only thing that a non-materialistic explanation can be demonstrated to violate is particular groups' theologies. At which point you start to get into some extremely nasty business.

The context of the discussion that started this point, was about you stating that you couldn't believe any scientist who disagreed with the ToE if that scientist also possessed some measure of religious faith.This is of course a patently absurd notion, and I am surprised that you weren't aware of the absurdity of it from the start.If a scientist in the field of biology (or genetics, or anthropology, or other similar field) had determined through their scientific research that the data does not support the conclusion that random mutations can account for the diversity of life on earth, then OF COURSE they would have some measure of believe in some kind of guiding force to the world. What other options are there? If it isn't randomness doing the changes, then something is, right. Can there be any other choices?Now, you can disagree with their conclusions if you wish. But your conclusions for your belief in atheism are derived the same way- by looking at the data, the only difference being that you know less about the subject to draw that conclusion than a trained biologist (Or possibly one might suspect that is NOT how you have come to the conclusion-perhaps your own religious background also plays a part in your conclusion-in which case your findings would be even more suspect). So you are deriving your faith in atheism from studying what little data you know, but you are denying their faith from studying the subject much more extensively than you. You simply choose to ignore them, because their conclusion doesn't fit the one you want.So what if a scientist started out with NO notion about his religious ideas at all, but after studying the subject intensively for many years, realizes that the numbers simply don't add up (as many scientists have concluded), so they begin to develop a sense that there is more to the world than randomness at play here-which of course would lead to a religious belief (of some kind). Now you have just disqualified their expertise precisely because their expertise has shown that it is not randomness.If you don't have the ability to see the absurdity of your argument (which is simply, "I will consider all other conclusions, just so long as they are the same conclusions as mine"), than it is also no surprise that the conclusions you have drawn from your limited knowledge of the subject are not grounded on a very solid bed of logic.Edited by Bolder-dash, : No reason given.

Clearly English isn't your first language, so I understand why you completely failed to appreciate what I was saying. It then goes without saying then your accusations of absurdity and limited knowledge are without foundation. Yep, irrespective of their religious beliefs, this is good: they have determined by evidential means a conclusion (let's gloss over the practicalities of determining such a negative). Go on... oh, epc, EPIC FAIL A "guiding force to the world" - what the hell is that?We have soundly concluded that X cannot be responsible for Y, and thus we conclude - IT MUST ME A GUIDING FORCE TO THE WORLD Oh, I'm sorry, I'm dribbling all over my keyboard.For the love of the FSM, why? WHY THE FUCK NOT? Have you even looked?Tell me, in the history of scientific study, how many observations have been successfully explained by a physical scientific explanation, and how many have been agreed that no known physical scientific explanation suffices, and a guiding force, or religious explanation has been used. How many exactly?Sorry, just have to

I have provided you the exact reason of why the fuck not, but you have missed it.The opposite of random is systematic or planned. The answer is that simple.If it is logically possible for life to exist in a way which doesn't rely on randomness, but which also is not planned, guided or designed, in some way, please explain how that could be.

We also don't have to gloss over the practicality of "determining such a negative" as you say.In one can show that the rate of randomly occurring mutations in all species on the planet are not sufficient enough to provide the changes the ToE proposes given the time frame we have to work with, and the finite number of organisms in which to confer these mutated traits, then we have "determined a negative" as you say.

Hmmm, now it's random, not random mutation. Let's not beat around the bush - you are saying that if the evolutionary processes of random mutation and natural selection are not sufficient to explain the origin of species, then the **ONLY POSSIBLE ALTERNATIVE** is something planned, guided or designed. And you wonder why we our asses off.Let me try again:Tell me, in the history of scientific study, how many observations have been successfully explained by a physical scientific explanation, and how many have been agreed that no known physical scientific explanation suffices, and a guiding force, or religious explanation has been used. How many exactly?

I have noticed a trend amongst many (most) evolutionists, they always try their best to run away from the word and concept of randomness ( I can see why). Unfortunately the theory doesn't allow you to escape this, because the theory posits only blind, purposeless, genetic accidents which may or may not be selected for.So again, I ask you, if not blind, purposeless accidents, what else can you have which doesn't require a plan?

no, they just desperately try to get people to understand the concept and its place within whatever subject they are talking about. Like most creationists, you seem to have little control over your terminology. Which is hilarious, when you think of what you are like in the other thread concerning "dimensions". As scientists, we have fairly strict definitions of the words we use, and although admittedly context will often have a large role in which definition is used, we at least have the decency of consistency. You could try it some time... you may like it. I guess if we're defining blind, purposeless accidents as "not a plan", then I'll grant it you by definition.*BUT* you were talking about random mutation and natural selection not being able to account for the origin of species. Have you ennumerated all of the possible counter-theories to the Theory of Evolution, which all involve "not a plan"? Or have you just shrugged, said "can't think of any", and declared ***GODDIDIT***?So I ask again,Tell me, in the history of scientific study, how many observations have been successfully explained by a physical scientific explanation, and how many have been agreed that no known physical scientific explanation suffices, and a guiding force, or religious explanation has been used. How many exactly?