h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

'it is a well known scientific result that no formal system can be complete.'

You really, really, really better check that again, just to be complete *and* consistent.

'What makes you think that one affects the other, instead of both being simply different manifestations of the same process?'

Truth be told, I tend toward the 'different manifestations of the same process' idea. But, I was wondering about what other people think, specificaly, how people who believe the soul is the undying essence of us-ness that pilots our body but will forever remain a mystery manages to steer the clay about.

But I've had enough of laying the question out clearly. If people have a problem with the question, perhaps they'd best not bother with the question (and maybe spend a bit more time with basic mathematics so they don't rubbish themselves by bringing ill-understood snippets of into conversations.)

verily, i pronounce this thread closed

<> (anhaga)

I think I also go along with that, anhaga.

'Subjective reality' is in fact an oxymoron, is it not?

As for 'objective reality' - how would we know? We experience everything within our temporal state. So I think it is clearer to call it a 'subjective experience' rather a 'subjective reality'.

And while I have a 'notion' that there is more out there than I am able to perceive (and sometimes I feel I have 'gone there' at times) I also realise that my 'base' is here in the world of living and dying.

Imagination is also not reality, except for ourselves on a personal level, but again, I think the word 'experience' works better.


az

A Cristian responds-
the first book of the bible said God breatheed into man the breath of life and man became a living soul. That is what they call special creation. Yet most of mans actions in affecting his body are no different than that of an Ape. both can decide to scratch with a stick. the differance comes in the source of the ideas.
Furthermore the magical and the miraculous might seem interchangable.
Today is Easter when we celebrate the fact that Christ who was dead is now alive. Jesus said he had the power to lay down his life and to pick it up again. Another christian saying is absent from the body means present with the Lord. Jesus said You must be born again- what is born of the flesh is flesh, what is born of the spirit is spirit. Billy Graham said I've never seen the wind- I've seen the effects of the wind but I have never seen the wind. Perhaps we could say the soul affects the body like a tree swaying in the wind.

But you can observe the wind with wind speed measuring thingies and pressure measuring things. You can record its sound and sometimes its smell. You can model it using very very hard maths. You can force it to work an aerofoil and drive a windsurfer or sailing ship faster than the wind itself moves.

Why can't we do anything like this with a soul?

also of course the wind and the tree exist seperately of each other, 1 can be present and not the other
the soul is supposed to be an integral part of humans

I never quite got the hang of the whole 'lay down His life and pick it up again' bit.
Surely, it's the irreversibility of death that's the whole reason it's generally seen as a Bad Thing.
If a surgeon tells me they will have to chill my brain and stop my heart for 10 minutes to perform an operation, and I'll be *technically* dead, but guaranteed to be brought back to life afterwards, I'm not sure I'd consider it as actual death in any meaningful sense.

From my point of view, if someone really wanted more than a handful of people to believe they really were immortal, I'd have thought a really guaranteed certifiable death (decapitation, hanging/drawing/quartering, etc) followed by an *immediate* public resurrection and copious public appearances ("Yoohoo, Mr Pilate, remember me?") would seem to have been the logical way to go about things.

Crap! The one day I decide not to watch Fox News is the one day that they have someone on that could answer my question: http://mediamatters.org/items/200503250006






(actually, I never watch Fox News.)

Hoo, boy...
Isn't this being taken way too seriously?
Just a quick thought: How many of you can say that you're content with your lives? How many of you know why you get up each day, and know why you keep on waking up? How many of you can say that you could die happy today?

How many of you know why all the answers are what they are?

We keep on living to change the world we live in. To change our lives.
Like I care!
I live because I see beauty around me every day. I don't question why the tree grows as it does because a) the tree hasn't tried taking over the world, and b) I can feel that it is something right and beautiful.
I watch the stars at night in awe of their presence because I know what they really are and what enormous energy is being released and what incredible and incomprehensible forces keep that star going.
The world is a wonderous thing. Do we really have to question something as beautiful and mysterious as the human soul?
Everything is connected.
Our soul is part of us. It is within us, without us, and all around us.
We are connected to it just as we are connected to all other things.
I find no reason to question this.

A dying man will question his pain and seek answers so that he can blame something for his death.
Two lovers do not question their love, but wonder in awe of something so incredible and wonderful and beautiful as their love for each other.
We only question when we seek to blame others.

"Ponder that for a while!"-Fred Alan Wolf, Ph.D.

Daitainius, whether I'm happy with my life or not is irrelevant to whether an entity called the soul exists, or whether everything we are is just a result of several trillion neurons sending messages to each other.

<>

Erm, yes. The existence of the soul is pretty much what this thread is about, in case you hadn't noticed. There are many of us who don't believe the soul exists, and even if it does, we're kinda confused which part of the brain it interacts with.

AND maybe understanding something will increase its beauty, not diminish it, like your appreciation of the stars.

<>

Could be

Hi Dai

And just when I thought that this thread had slipped quietly into that good night.

The search for knowledge and truth is part of what being human is all about. The dissatisfaction with the answer 'because it was ever thus'.

Humanity's problem, and never more so than now, is in its arrogance, especially amongst the professional truth-seekers, the scientists. Where they can see no easy evidence trail, no simple and elegant solutions, where they cannot connect something to the 'picture of all things' that their short lives have led them to, they scoff and dismiss it as superstition.

I should explain that I am druid, a truth-seeker in my own right. However, I differ from many in the rationalist wing of this debate in that I am not willing to give up on something simply because I either do not yet understand it or it challenges what we pathetically call 'logic'.

Don't get me wrong I love pure science, just never had the maths to really keep up with it. I am able to accept that much that scientists talk about I shall never understand and am willing to take the leap of faith required to support their work.

Unfortunately I am seeing more and more scientists, and their 'devotees', make declarations that show they are closing their minds and their eyes to anything that doesn't easily fit their preconceptions and neat theorems.

There are still pioneers in the scientific community, men and women who refuse to bend the knee to scientific orthodoxy, and it is upon them I place my hope for our future. Long may they rebel.

The soul, the spirit, the animus, the ka, call it what you will, is that spark of creativity that separates us from base matter. It is not the sole preserve of humanity despite our proud assertions to superiority over other species.

Perhaps one day we will truly glimpse what it is and can become, and that will be the first step on a marvellous journey.

Blessings,
Matholwch /|\

Oi...
Alright, listen.
To me there is a difference between understanding and knowlege.
Knowing how something works is not understanding, it is knowlege.
Feeling the energies of something and feeling its effects on you is understanding.
I understand how the soul works because I can feel it at work.
I can feel it as part of everything and can feel everything through it.
I don't know how this works, but I understand and feel it working.
In a sense I am awed by understanding.

It's just that our senses of understanding contradict each other!
But mine's better.

Right. There's a lot here Daitainius. I'll just offer an answer to one of your questions, for what it's worth, and a comment, for what it's worth.

'How many of you can say that you could die happy today?'

I could, for one. But so what?

'To me there is a difference between understanding and knowlege.'

I agree with that bit, but the rest of it clearly demonstrates that you and I speak different languages. I know each of your words, but I don't understand a thing you're saying..

"The stars are made of the same atoms as the earth." I usually pick one small topic like this to give a lecture on. Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars -- mere gobs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere." I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?
The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination -- stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern -- of which I am a part -- perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star, as one is belching there. Or see them with the greater eye of Palomar, rushing all apart from some common starting point when they were perhaps all together.
What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the *why?* It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?

-- Richard P. Feynman (1918-1988)

'How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant'? Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.' A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.'

Carl Sagan, 'Billions and Billions'.

lol, this is turning into a quotefest

~ db

PS: not wanting to dredge old things up, but my post about the features of reality raised objections on the count that a subjective view of reality wasn't useful, and that (my post) was just obfuscating. I think the trouble is that my meaning of 'reality' wasn't clear. I amn't talking about physical reality - I would hardly contest what would happen if I took a leap off the 23rd floor - but I am talking about those aspects of reality that we aren't so sure of, especially those that involve our minds as an instrument of measurement. When we talk of physical realities, our bodies serve as tangible instruments that provide clear impressions of reality (I hold a stick, and I can feel it, I fall off a building, and my bones break). When we talk of these 'mentally perceived' realities, such as the existence of a soul, however, then the possibility of that reality being constructed, instead of being just perceived, becomes more plausible, even more fruitful. Someone else's mind which believes in/perceives a soul is not something we can easily evaluate, because a mind doesn't leave incontestable impressions very easily.

You can feel your soul? What's it like?

Math, I have to say that personally I find mystics far more arrogant than scientists.

Faith never built an aqueduct.

How many mystics do you know Bouncy?


alji

This is the Forum, not askh2g2. That's what you expect.


That seems to be contradictory. Why are you happy to have knowledge AND understanding of one & not the other?

Personally, I wouldn't say that knowing & understanding the science behind marvels of nature in any way detracts from my admiration & wonder of them. Rather the reverse. So I seek knowledge & understanding in topics that interest me - such as the question of souls.

Where mysticism is defined as "A belief in the existence of realities beyond perceptual or intellectual apprehension that are central to being and directly accessible by subjective experience," well I know rather a lot of them.