Proofs of Evolution: A Mediocre Debate (Faith, robinrohan and their invitees)

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NOT-SO-GREAT DEBATE THREAD ** NOT-SO-GREAT DEBATE THREAD **
==================================================================Hi Sidelined, this IS a Great Debate thread but I'm not going to complain about your crashing it since Robin and I long ago wandered off the debate. It's become more of a chitchat thread -- or a whatever-comes-up thread -- and nobody's complaining for some reason, which is all right with me. If he wants to complain we'll continue to keep it to ourselves, but meanwhile I will treat you as an Invitee.Anyway: There is ALWAYS a physical explanation, there is never a shortage of those.But you remind me that I didn't feel quite right about the word "feeling" in "feeling of incorporeality" as that implies a subjectivity. I think the incorporeality isn't a mere feeling but something we all *know* about the mind. Even if it were true that mind is a product of the brain, in itself it is incorporeal just as the words I'm writing are incorporeal in themselves. The meaning or thought that passes from me to you and you to me is incorporeal. And speaking of the body, sensations in the body, while produced by the physical body, and trackable along neuronal pathways, are also incorporeal in themselves. My own explanation for this is that the brain is a tool of the mind for functioning in the physical world, and we can't do without it for those functions. If it breaks down we are handicapped in those functions. But the mind or soul is something else, and it goes on living.==================================================================
NOT-SO-GREAT DEBATE THREAD ** NOT-SO-GREAT DEBATE THREAD **
=================================================================={abe: for clarity's sake I hope}This message has been edited by Faith, 01-15-2006 07:54 PM

You're right. But it should be as before: a direct question.Your responses, Faith, were substantial and very good, but I can't respond just yet. Duty calls. Back later.

No, mostly shop-talk about teaching.

mind=soul.

This is over my head.

Soul is often presented as including {abe: or made up of} intellect, emotion and will.This message has been edited by Faith, 01-15-2006 08:46 PM

Which part, my conceptualization of the Universal Mind as a soupy yet incorporeal omnipresence, or the idea of immanence?This message has been edited by Faith, 01-15-2006 08:45 PM

OK. Because if soul was something different from "mind," that would be a problem.

All of it.I suppose this would be chicken soup?

Drat, I hoped it would be easily grasped. That will do. Chicken noodle maybe. Anyway, just my way at the time of picturing the omnipresence of Universal Mind in relation to the physical universe. Although there is apparently nothing at all in between all the bits of stuff in the chicken soup, all those galaxies, all those atoms, yet God is present everywhere, between the electrons and positrons and everywhere else.And "within" it all too, that should be said, but that starts to get into pantheism, which I'm trying to avoid, the idea that God is IN everything and animates everything, and therefore that physical objects deserve worship, or that nothing really has an independent existence from God. Partly I'm too lazy to research it too. "Immanence" has all the same pitfalls. This whole train of thought gets heretical if not carefully defined and I'm way too tired right now to want to pin it down. My first conceptualization of God left something to be desired. I just thought it would be easy to picture. If not then not.More anecdotal information out of my tiring brain (I'm going to have to take a break soon): serious Zen Buddhist friend during those days who had much meditative experience, commented in the context of discussing that experience that "science doesn't know anything." (Her brother was/is a nuclear physicist and coming from her that was startling).I, out of my own brand-new experience of the Far Out, responded, "Oh but it's not wrong, it's just that what science studies is something different, something smaller."She, Zen style, without words, put her two outstretched index fingers side by side half an inch apart.She doesn't believe in God.This message has been edited by Faith, 01-15-2006 10:01 PM

The Spiritual Soup concept also expressed my sense of spiritual cause and effect between us all and all aspects of life.By the way, while I think that original notion has something going for it, I don't think of God in those terms any more. That picture was eventually replaced by the Biblical YAHWEH, who is a personal God. I didn't understand evil in those days either, and that changed the picture somehow too. Learning about the Fall and the devil came later.I'm probably just running on now because I didn't really get what you didn't really get.By the way, I probably won't be able to post much in the next few days.This message has been edited by Faith, 01-16-2006 04:38 AM

I found it surprising too, but he talks about it off and on throughout the first half. In Book VII, for example, his discusses the problem at length. Here's an excerpt: And here's a very telling passage: Note that last sentence. It tells us that he realized finally that his own thoughts were incorporeal, and thus incorporeality could exist in some form.I suspect that when you read it, you didn't pay much attention to such passages because your interest lay elsewhere. But this was what interested me.

I should mention that Parasomnium says that this aura of incorporeality is an illusion. I think his explanation is the same as Sidelined's. Parasomnium is a philosophical materialist. However, he is also careful to point out that consciousness is real. It's the aura or feeling that is an illusion.In fact, in order to accept TOE, one would almost have to be a materialist, I would think. More about this idea later, perhaps.

Okay. I might write down some more of my deep thoughts, of which I have many, but don't feel obligated to respond if you don't have time.

it always comes back to thought, mind, etc., doesn't it. That's the "stuff" God is "made of."I'm getting his first problem too, I think. A diffused "substance" maybe sort of like soup. Except I could think of the "soup" as completely invisible Mind that extends everywhere without exactly extending. But I'm getting what his problem was. And it's common. It explains why people so easily believe in nothing but materiality. I think you're right.Do keep writing down your thoughts.This message has been edited by Faith, 01-16-2006 11:20 AM