Mod+ 269. DR. MICHAEL SHERMER, SKEPTICAL SCIENCE REPORTING

Nice try. I offer evidence rather than hand-waving, and you continue to insist that the hypothesis it's meant to counteract has equivalence. You're right that I don't know the evidence I have pointed to accounts for the existence of consciousness distinct from brain, but nonetheless, it is actual evidence, and on balance, much more convincing than the hand-waving you mentioned.

If you find my argument a waste of time, you don't have to come here. You don't have to listen; put your fingers in your ears and say "la la la" and pretend that you're still right. I can't stop you.

I don't think anyone has ever accused me of not listening...

I'm not trying to "prove" anything nor asking you to. And I agree with your POV on the existence of consciousness. I will go further and say I specifically think it has a non-physical basis.

I'm simply claiming the following: to say or imply that it is illogical or inconsistent to say that someone can't simultaneously think they are a BR and also feel that there is personal meaning in their life, doesn't make sense to me.

Can you comment on the snip in italics? I'm just asking if it is a fair opinion to hold from a logic standpoint.
 
I don't think anyone has ever accused me of not listening...

I'm not trying to "prove" anything nor asking you to. And I agree with your POV on the existence of consciousness. I will go further and say I specifically think it has a non-physical basis.

I'm simply claiming the following: to say or imply that it is illogical or inconsistent to say that someone can't simultaneously think they are a BR and also feel that there is personal meaning in their life, doesn't make sense to me.

Can you comment on the snip in italics? I'm just asking if it is a fair opinion to hold from a logic standpoint.

I'm aware that you personally aren't a materialist. However, you are also saying that the materialist position is perfectly justifiable. It is this that I take exception to. It isn't perfectly justifiable; it isn't even well thought out. It's just hand-waving: one can challenge it very easily. However, when one does, that is simply ignored, and the ignorance is willful.

I'd comment on the part of the snip that is in italics except that all of the snip is in italics and so I don't know exactly what you are referring to.
 
I'm aware that you personally aren't a materialist. However, you are also saying that the materialist position is perfectly justifiable. It is this that I take exception to. It isn't perfectly justifiable; it isn't even well thought out. It's just hand-waving: one can challenge it very easily. However, when one does, that is simply ignored, and the ignorance is willful.

I'd comment on the part of the snip that is in italics except that all of the snip is in italics and so I don't know exactly what you are referring to.

This is all that is italics-
it is illogical or inconsistent to say that someone can't simultaneously think they are a BR and also feel that there is personal meaning in their life
 
Sorry Alex. But that answer is just plain worthless, and beneath you. I can't believe you even spent the time to put fingers to the keys....

Tbh i didnt get what he was saying. It'd be great if Alex could clarifiy which aspects of Radin's experiments he referred to when he said that they would imply that...

That got nothing to do with Mac being anything.
I agree. If you are going to bring up Radin, then talk specifically about what Radin is doing. Pointing to the entirety of Skeptiko is kind of silly. Sometimes there is a little bit too much shorthand.

Alex, IMO it would behoove you stop using wishy washy language and get right to the heart of it. You're not talking about "meaning", you're talking about God, right? God as either the prime mover or as an ongoing presence or as the universe itself. Why are you so unable to answer the question directly? What are you talking about? Will you please clarify?

it's like we're talking past each other... maybe I don't understand your starting point, or you don't understand mine.

If you're looking for me to tease out why/how Radin/Schartz/van Lommel/Long/Beauregard/Shreldrake have falsified mind=brain... well, come on... I do have about 200 (100 was a low estimate) shows about that. not saying you have to agree with me, but it's kinda pointless to try and cover all that ground here.

so, mind>brain is my starting point... or you might say my end point.

I assume you guys are starting (or staying with) mind=brain.

if you're going with mind=brain then "meaningless universe" is logically consistent... i.e. you just stick to your closed-loop reductionistic system -- this is the biological robot model. it's seems incredibly silly to hold to this given the data (not to mention the philosophical silliness of it), but plenty of otherwise smart people do... you're in good company :)

if you're at mind>brain then "meaningless universe" runs into a lot of problems because you have to offer a real explanation for all the NDE/STE and other stuff I've mentioned. from there it's a very slippery slope to having to a meaningful life :)

so, my point was/is that you can't logically mix the two. you can't say --
I'm just a stimulus-response biological machine (i.e. biological robot) living in a meaningless universe and then turn around and say the the illusion of meaning your life is somehow real... there's no where to store your meaning in this meaningless universe.
 
This is all that is italics-
it is illogical or inconsistent to say that someone can't simultaneously think they are a BR and also feel that there is personal meaning in their life

Ah, right. You meant the bit in the snip of your own posting.

My answer is that people can certainly simultaneously assert that they are BR and also feel there is personal meaning in their lives. But if they do, that's not a reasonable position to take based on the sketchiness of the evidence they claim, which simply doesn't stand up to close scrutiny.
 
so, my point was/is that you can't logically mix the two. you can't say --I'm just a stimulus-response biological machine (i.e. biological robot) living in a meaningless universe and then turn around and say the the illusion of meaning your life is somehow real... there's no where to store your meaning in this meaningless universe.

Well put!:)
 
Some posters here seem to believe that to believe other than they believe is unreasonable and illogical.
I think that belief is unreasonable and illogical.
 
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if you're at mind>brain then "meaningless universe" runs into a lot of problems because you have to offer a real explanation for all the NDE/STE and other stuff I've mentioned. from there it's a very slippery slope to having to a meaningful life :)
.

OK so lets just start here.

I'm not trying to prove/disprove or in any way argue the whole mind>brain thing. Let's not even talk about where I'm at on that score because that doesn't matter.

I'm trying to take a little piece of your system of thought and tease out a little detail, and look at it closely. And the reason I'm trying to do this, is that I see you discussing this aspect of your "system" with guests and it never resonates with them. And I think I can see why. But to get to that , we need to talk about it in isolation.

The little piece has to do with whether it makes any sense to hold the following opinion. "I think that I am a biological robot. But that doesn't mean I feel like one. I feel like I have free will and I am really living a life with meaning, at least to me. But I think this sense of self, call it consciousness, derives from the physical nature of my electrical/chemical brain, sense, and nervous system that are part of my physical body. Oh, and I also feel that the universe is simply a physical object with no intention or other non-physical aspect."

For now, the question I'm trying to get to has nothing to do with whether this opinion is correct, or if is provable,,, that requires that we get into the whole system discussion again. I'd just like to ask you if you think that this opinion is somehow illogical because it is internally inconsistent or has some similar fallacy. ie: do you think a reasonable person couldn't have this opinion because it makes no sense on it's face. Again, I'm trying to avoid discussing the proof points a this stage because once you get into the huge multitude of proofs and counter-proofs things start to turn into a hairball and it is easy to loose your way. I'd like to take this a step at a time.
 
Bertha, I've been pondering the problem of evil, which is basically what you pointed to in your post about the recent death of that opera singer and her family, as well as all the other folk who died in the crash over the Alps.

My stab at resolving this is to take a different perspective from the one that we usually take. Most of the time, we are immersed in seeming everyday reality, and identify with the beingness we seem to possess within it. It is from here that we look at pain and suffering and cruelty and ask, how can I reconcile this with the existence of a creator who is pure Love?

Let's look at it from another perspective, the one that we will putatively have when we die, which NDEers maintain is more real than what we usually take as reality: a reality in which we are indestructible, and this world is actually a temporary training ground. It would make no sense to know this was just a training ground, because then it wouldn't seem to be real and we wouldn't take it seriously. We could learn nothing that way, and the general idea is that the training ground is a place to learn things that will potentially be advantageous to us in a higher reality.

We can come here and learn, or we may screw it up and not learn as much as we should, but whatever, this is only a temporary state of affairs. As individuals and societies, we make our choices, and with a little luck and good will, have the chance to learn.

If the Source Of All is going to provide a training ground to facilitate our learning, then It can't go half-arsed at it. We have to have free will, and there has to be the possibility of things going wrong, possibly by complete chance. From the current perspective, where we're not quite sure that we are indestructible, we often have the greatest difficulty reconciling an all-loving Source with some of the things that can happen here.

But actually, if that's the way it really is, then this world, with all its seeming faults, is a great mercy. Look at the holocaust, for example, possibly the most horrible thing that has ever happened, or the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Horrible things, simply horrible.

But, and it might seem callous to say it, as societies, we've had the opportunity to learn from these events; the opportunity to note them and ensure they don't happen again. None of the people who died in them have actually ceased to be, and from the perspective of indestructibility, may appreciate that their deaths, in the long run, have had a beneficial effect on human evolution: on making the training ground a better place to be, a better place to learn.

I would add that we're all, putatively, chips off the Old Block. Just many different facets of Source Consciousness, with the implication that actually, it is SC that is doing the suffering in millions of different ways. It's not asking us to suffer things It itself doesn't suffer, and hence there is perfect Justice in the universe.
 
Bertha, I've been pondering the problem of evil, which is basically what you pointed to in your post about the recent death of that opera singer and her family, as well as all the other folk who died in the crash over the Alps.
Thanks for your thoughts Michael. My thinking parallels much of your own thought - such as, if this is a training ground, then we cannot be allowed to know really that there is more afterward. Although, there seems to be then a loophole regarding mediumship and after-death communications (of which I suspect I have been the recipient myself of). So I guess one might ask oneself - why the loopholes? If we're not suppose to know, shouldn't it be more airtight? :)

The NDE research does provide some amount of optimistic hope. Far more then 2000 year old biblical stories or going to church each Sunday, or kneeling and bowing down to the ground each afternoon. The death-bed visions work by Barrett, and more recently Osis & Haraldsson "At the Hour of Death" publication (1977) I have found supportive and relevant. Both classes of phenomena (death-bed visions, NDEs) do reinforce the possibility that (at least in some cases) death may not be this terror filled occurrence, as many accounts describe ineffable feelings of love, or exquisite music, and very often the presence of dead ones the dying either sense or actually appear to perceive - as if greeting them and assisting them with what would obviously be a pretty momentous transition.

A great deal does hinge on the concept that consciousness itself is not as perishable as the every day objects we appear to interact with in what we consider objective reality. Although what is striking, even here, is that these same objects do not have the kind of permanency that our perceptions assume, given what has been established in quantum physics and the nature of sub-atomic particles collapsing upon observation. Or that virtual particles come in and out of existence in the large distances of outer-space. The beggared question here is, from where do these virtual particles come from, and where do they go to?? One could of course, ask the same question for the universe itself. From where did it come from - and where will it go to? And how can time itself have a beginning? And how can time possibly end?

The problem of suffering to me though is the toughest nut in the universal bag of tricks thrown at us. Yes - there have been all sorts of official answers by organized religion. Yet - I am reminded of a quote:

"But am I bound to feel - can any bribe of personal happiness justify me in feeling - religious enthusiasm for a universe in which even one being may have been summoned into a sentiency destined to inescapable pain?" -FWH Myers

Myers also once wrote to his good friend William James:

"The mystery of the Universe and the indefensibility of human suffering are never far from me." ~Myers

I admit, I often find myself sharing the same feelings as Myers here. Why indeed, is it so necessary for so many to suffer so? If there is indeed this amazing loving reality beyond the one we now find ourselves - why not just remain in existence there? Why even bother with this "earthly" existence? Surely, if consciousness is as expansive, the source of it is so loving - then elements of the reality we now experience here and now, can be echoed elsewhere, but without all the incredible horror and absurdities that we all know are present in this sad - vicious, greed infested world we find ourselves in.

I never bought into the religious idea that we're here to be "tested" and if we fail the test, off to hell we go. That you better be good, or else you will be punished. It just is such kindergarten moral thinking, just as an anthropomorphized God is kindergarten thinking. Our current religions - so many of them set in stone thousands of years ago now - no longer can really fit the mold of what we are today (IMO). Science, if anything has indeed advanced our thought. Human thought has grown. But human spirituality - at least organized spirituality remains rigid, unflinching, dogmatic - about as dogmatic as the Materialists who now fervently advocate their nihilism as if they suddenly have come up with some new, all encompassing truth about the world and ourselves. All I see is more dogmatic fundamentalism yet again being forced upon the general culture by today's popular materialists.

It clearly is a mystery. Maria Radner and the rest of those poor people on German Wings are now gone forever - at least from the existence you and I know. We too, will follow some day. Frederic Myers even when young, was horrified by the prospect of any living being's possible complete annihilation at death. And how indeed can one love life, love all that there is about life, and not be horrified by the fact it will all just end for yourself, and all those that you have loved - as no more than temporary perishable things. The Skeptic materialists - the Saganites insist we should be content with this, that there is enough wonder in the universe (never mind all the horror and poverty and pain that is visited on so many souls) that this in itself should be sufficient for a good life. I never could myself believe in that - that how could one love a reality, where as Myers states - even one being is brought into existence for a life of inescapable pain? Where is the meaning there for that individual? Are we to determine meaning as strictly universal, and the individual just a casualty of universal laws that will randomly smash any living thing out of existence whenever it randomly suits it?

So. But thanks for your response. I think these questions about consciousness and death are the reason why I find myself so interested in psi and nde phenomena. They are important questions, and have been asked since the time of the Greeks. And unlike Stephen Hawkings, or Niel deGrasse Tyson - I don't believe philosophy is quite dead yet. Or these pretty important questions have been answered beyond all doubt.

My Best,
Bertha
 
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"I think that I am a biological robot. But that doesn't mean I feel like one. I feel like I have free will and I am really living a life with meaning, at least to me. But I think this sense of self, call it consciousness, derives from the physical nature of my electrical/chemical brain, sense, and nervous system that are part of my physical body. Oh, and I also feel that the universe is simply a physical object with no intention or other non-physical aspect."
sure, that sounds logically consistent to me.

of course, declaring yourself a "biological robot" is logically inconsistent with every aspect of how you live and experience life (I assume), but that's another matter.
 
Thanks for your thoughts Michael. My thinking parallels much of your own thought...

Like I said Bertha, it was just my own stab at an explanation, and many of the points you express are still mysterious. That may be a function of the effectiveness of the rules of the training ground, but as you say, they don't seem to be totally applicable. Some claim to have perceived the world beyond, and the scientific evidence is slowly converging on a similar conclusion, materialism notwithstanding.

The real mystery to me is why materialism has such an appeal to many people; why they feel the need to abolish mystery, and why they feel more comfortable with that. In the end, someone else touched on a possible reason: they are reacting against conventional religion, which they see (largely correctly), as a con job, and about that, we can all agree.

But the lengths they are prepared to go to, the pure ridiculousness of the constructs they are prepared to come up with, and the willful ignorance of contrary evidence, is still amazing to behold.
 
I also interested in accounts of folks who report taking on the "evil role" during a life... not saying I agree or even know what this means, but it's interesting to ponder.

Yeah. It's a sobering thought, but maybe the Adolph Hitlers of this world are a necessary evil: people who are accelerating evolution, rather than slowing it down, by dint of their absolute appallingness. They're just so transparently bad that no one can mistake it.

It's the old Yin/Yang thing: dark giving rise to light and light to dark; and I always remember what Idries Shah once wrote: that good and evil intertwine, and at times, it's difficult to differentiate them.
 
1. consciousness survives death and 2, decisions matter in some sense beyond this material world... i.e. life has meaning... or if your uber-agnostic... has the potential to have meaning.

What? So if our decisions have consequences that go off into other lives and other worlds then this life has meaning, but if our decisions only have conseqences for this life and this world then life has no meaning whatsoever.

I don't understand how adding other lives and other worlds makes any difference here, and likewise I don't see how making the consequences very long-term or eternal helps either. The whole thing (i.e. all the worlds and lives put together) could still be totally meaningless.

A stronger point would be that meaning, value and mind can't just magically emerge from a universe that doesn't have these things in the first place. This is what the debate between materialists and the consciousness-as-fundamental people really comes down to, in my opinion.
 
I understand your point.

Thanks for hearing me out! Hope my criticism hasn't been too harsh.. I know it's easy to armchair quarter-back an interview after the fact and much harder to actually engage an experienced debater like Shwormer who wiggles his way out of everything.
 
it's like we're talking past each other... maybe I don't understand your starting point, or you don't understand mine.

If you're looking for me to tease out why/how Radin/Schartz/van Lommel/Long/Beauregard/Shreldrake have falsified mind=brain... well, come on... I do have about 200 (100 was a low estimate) shows about that. not saying you have to agree with me, but it's kinda pointless to try and cover all that ground here.

so, mind>brain is my starting point... or you might say my end point.

I assume you guys are starting (or staying with) mind=brain.

if you're going with mind=brain then "meaningless universe" is logically consistent... i.e. you just stick to your closed-loop reductionistic system -- this is the biological robot model. it's seems incredibly silly to hold to this given the data (not to mention the philosophical silliness of it), but plenty of otherwise smart people do... you're in good company :)

if you're at mind>brain then "meaningless universe" runs into a lot of problems because you have to offer a real explanation for all the NDE/STE and other stuff I've mentioned. from there it's a very slippery slope to having to a meaningful life :)

so, my point was/is that you can't logically mix the two. you can't say --
I'm just a stimulus-response biological machine (i.e. biological robot) living in a meaningless universe and then turn around and say the the illusion of meaning your life is somehow real... there's no where to store your meaning in this meaningless universe.

Why won't you answer my questions about God?
 
What? So if our decisions have consequences that go off into other lives and other worlds then this life has meaning, but if our decisions only have conseqences for this life and this world then life has no meaning whatsoever.

I don't understand how adding other lives and other worlds makes any difference here, and likewise I don't see how making the consequences very long-term or eternal helps either. The whole thing (i.e. all the worlds and lives put together) could still be totally meaningless.

A stronger point would be that meaning, value and mind can't just magically emerge from a universe that doesn't have these things in the first place. This is what the debate between materialists and the consciousness-as-fundamental people really comes down to, in my opinion.

Well said. Though I think I see what Alex is getting at... the notion that a falsification of the materialist paradigm also puts to bed the overreaching assertion materialists usually make that the cosmos is somehow fundamentally "faceless". Err... am I right?

I think you're close to the crux of the matter, Dominic, but a strong materialist would swoosh his hand and say there's nothing magical about it, you just haven't understood epiphenomenal processes.

I'm admittedly a newcomer to the podcast, but I think it's probably a dead-end street to get caught up talking about something as tricky as "the meaning of it all" with someone whose view of the matter is dogmatic. If your goal is to show up the materialist viewpoint, better to focus on hammering on the data that falsifies their models, and their refusal to engage with it. That's hard to dodge after a point, and is the surest way to show their dogmatism and cognitive dissonance for what it is.

I was engaging with someone in another thread who seemed to be of the opinion that scientists are immune to cognitive dissonance, and (it is therefore implied) exempt from psychological limitations in general, in effect having transcended human nature. I suspect that if you polled a lot of materialists, you'd find this fantasy to be a pretty widespread one. That's probably a weak point in their armor that could be exploited to make their foolishness really apparent. (How DO you account for the cognitive dissonance problem, Dr. So-and-So? Do you engage unfamiliar material with the rigorous intellectual agnosticism that any high school student ostensibly learns is the basis of scientific method? You do? Great, I have some new data for you to look at. Wait, you're not interested? That seems a bit curious. Say, you're not suffering from psychological discomfort right now, are you?)
 
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I agree with those who think this world is not some kind of test or training ground. I never thought the test theory made any sense. Many NDEers report there is no judgement after life, but there is a life review where we witness and evaluate our life experience. This does make sense to me.

On the problem of meaning and meaninglessness; if we accept the testimony of NDEers then (it seems to me) the person we live as in this world is not our real identity. I mean the human person that begins as an infant etc. When we talk about meaning, we usually mean meaning from the point of view of the human person in this world; but if the person we live as in this world is not our real self, then that is also not the perspective from which to evaluate the meaning of our human life. If when we die we discover we are not human or mortal, our life in this world will have an entirely different significance from that perspective than it does from the perspective of a mortal human person.
I sometimes wonder about the experience of death for a fundamentalist materialist; especially a militant one such as Dawkins or Dennett who devote so much of their lives to trying to prove there is no meaning in life and no ‘self’ in our human person; and to convince others they are just mortal material objects - biological machines.
I wonder will they pleased or disappointed they were wrong?
 
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