we gotta get this thing kick started again.

Discuss arguments for existence of God and faith in general. Any aspect of any orientation toward religion/spirituality, as long as it is based upon a positive open to other people attitude.

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met
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Re: we gotta get this thing kick started again.

Post by met » Thu Mar 21, 2013 1:17 pm

Magritte wrote:
met wrote:The problem is, fleet, those who believe the self has some kind of indestructible core would just argue that the one Meta had not been destroyed, just transmogrified into some other kind of existence, while the other was still here - and still being transmogrified in perhaps subtler ways by his experiences here too. So, for them, there is no continuity problem.
Right, and my thought experiment shows why this view is wrong.
(
Why? I don't understand your point at all (as usual). I think it only shows that there needs to be an indestructible core to us - alot of ancient cultures modeled the self as three parts - body, mind & spirit - probly for that reason. There needs to be some part of the self that survives all changes. (Consciousness itself, perhaps.) That provides for continuity, regardless of whether or not some aspects of the mind - like memories or individual identity - also survive.

Do you remember that the transporter on the original Star Trek could be criticized for making a copy of a person and then killing the original, so a new person is created every time someone transports, but a later (TNG) episode showed a character being conscious and even taking action inside the transporter beam?

Like that.
The “One” is the space of the “world” of the tick, but also the “pinch” of the lobster, or that rendezvous in person to confirm online pictures (with a new lover or an old God). This is the machinery operative...as “onto-theology."
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Re: we gotta get this thing kick started again.

Post by Metacrock » Thu Mar 21, 2013 2:01 pm

that was why McCoy hated the transporter. I always thought he had a damn point.
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Re: we gotta get this thing kick started again.

Post by mdsimpson92 » Thu Mar 21, 2013 11:55 pm

To put in the hard problem of emergentism. I found this:
But, as Galen Strawson (2006) has recently emphasized, emergentism is not a forgone conclusion. In fact, it is highly dubious. His piece “Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism” presses this point with notable urgency, and offers the most detailed and complete version of the Non-Emergence argument to date. If one is not a panpsychist, then one necessarily believes that only some subset of creatures is privileged to possess mind. The vast remainder of nature, then, is utterly non-mental. This, Strawson observes, is pure presumption: “there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever” (p. 20) for a non-mental component of reality. We simply assume it to be so.

Strawson’s argument, in a nutshell, is this:

There is one ultimate reality to the universe (“realistic physicalism,” as he calls it).
Mental (that is, experiential) phenomena are a part of this monistic reality. Therefore, experiential phenomena are physical phenomena, rightly understood.
Radical-kind, or brute, emergence is impossible; mental phenomena cannot arise from any purely non-mental stuff.
Therefore, the one reality and all things in it are necessarily experiential.
If we are to be physicalists, Strawson says, then let us be real physicalists and take the implications seriously. When we do so, we find that “something akin to panpsychism is not merely one possible form of realistic physicalism, but the only possible form, and hence, the only possible form of physicalism tout court” (p. 9).

Strawson tackles head-on those who implicitly endorse emergence. He asks, “Does this conception of emergence make sense? I think that it is very, very hard to understand what it is supposed to involve. I think that it is incoherent, in fact, and that this general way of talking of emergence has acquired an air of plausibility…for some simply because it has been appealed to many times in the face of a seeming mystery” (p. 12). He gives a number of examples of putative emergence, showing that each is really unintelligible. His slogan: “emergence can’t be brute,” that is, higher-order mind can emerge from lower-order, but mind cannot possibly emerge from no-mind. “Brute emergence is by definition a miracle every time it occurs,” which is rationally inconceivable.

Panpsychism thus offers a kind of resolution to the problem of emergence, and is supported by several other arguments as well. The viability of panpsychism is no longer really in question. At issue is the specific form it might take, and what its implications are. Panpsychism suggests a radically different worldview, one that is fundamentally at odds with the dominant mechanistic conception of the universe. Arguably, it is precisely this mechanistic view—which sees the universe and everything in it as a kind of giant machine—that lies at the root of many of our philosophical, sociological, and environmental problems. Panpsychism, by challenging this worldview at its root, potentially offers new solutions to some very old problems.
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Re: we gotta get this thing kick started again.

Post by Metacrock » Fri Mar 22, 2013 9:11 am

Panpsychism thus offers a kind of resolution to the problem of emergence, and is supported by several other arguments as well. The viability of panpsychism is no longer really in question. At issue is the specific form it might take, and what its implications are.
that's wild. that would shatter the world view of every atheist on carm. I don't see the conflict between panpsychism and emergence. I think emergence is the answer to reduction, it's the nemesis theory. Top down causation is part of emergence, that's a sub set of holism. Holism is the nemesis of reduction.

One thing I don't like about that piece is that it's reductionist too, it seeks to reduce everything to one thing; tries to equate that one thing with physical? why not mental? It's trying to make the mental part of the physical? why not the other way around?
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Re: we gotta get this thing kick started again.

Post by Metacrock » Fri Mar 22, 2013 9:12 am

Miles where did you get that?
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Re: we gotta get this thing kick started again.

Post by mdsimpson92 » Sat Mar 23, 2013 10:53 am

Julia: It's all... a dream...
Spike Spiegel: Yeah... just a dream...

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Re: we gotta get this thing kick started again.

Post by mdsimpson92 » Sat Mar 23, 2013 10:53 am

Julia: It's all... a dream...
Spike Spiegel: Yeah... just a dream...

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Re: we gotta get this thing kick started again.

Post by mdsimpson92 » Sat Mar 23, 2013 10:53 am

Julia: It's all... a dream...
Spike Spiegel: Yeah... just a dream...

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Re: we gotta get this thing kick started again.

Post by mdsimpson92 » Sat Mar 23, 2013 10:55 am

Fleet! TAKE A SHOT!
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Spike Spiegel: Yeah... just a dream...

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Re: we gotta get this thing kick started again.

Post by Metacrock » Sun Mar 24, 2013 9:12 am

mdsimpson92 wrote:Fleet! TAKE A SHOT!
I guess he's not interested. I thought it was shaping up into a good discussion.
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