We Actually Do Know that Literal “Spirits” Aren’t Real

[sunstoned]

14 hours ago, teddyaware said:

The National Institutes of Heath have just announced that suicide risks are 1200% higher among those who’ve had so-called “gender affirming surgery,” but you don’t want to talk about it because opposition to this Joseph Mengele inspired insanity is associated mainly with those who espouse traditional conservative family values? How strangely ironic it is that it’s the very people who support the shocking butchery of “gender affirming surgery,” and the mass slaughter of the innocent unborn, who are always equating those who hold traditional conservative family values with the monsters who perpetuated the fiendish horrors of Europe in the mid-20th century. Talk about a monumental lack of self awareness! But this is what happens when people turn away from the Spirit of God, for such are always occupied in deceiving others while simultaneously being deceived.

"In coming days, it will not be possible to survive spiritually without the guiding, directing, comforting, and constant influence of the Holy Ghost."
-President Russell M. Nelson.

What does any of this rant have to do with my comments?  I hope that somehow you find a way to let go of the anger and judgment.  

[MiserereNobis]

13 hours ago, rodheadlee said:

I have had quite a bit of experience with the LSD and one experience with dying and they are nothing alike, there is no similarity. Of course it's anecdotal evidence.

“Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream. It is not dying, it is not dying”

 

[Analytics]

On 5/17/2024 at 10:36 PM, BlueDreams said:

It's an interesting history. It just feels a little incomplete. Studying spirit by scientific direct means very likely schluffed off.

Surprisingly, that isn’t true, and that is one of the main points I’m trying to get across in this thread. Ever since Descartes articulated his believe that there was a ghost in the machine, serious thinkers have asked how can an intangible ghost push around a tangible machine? In 1637, Descartes had the sophisticated thought that the spirit interfaced with the brain through a pea-sized piece of tissue located in the very middle of your brain now known as the pineal gland (we now know he was wrong).

Fast forward to 1925, and Sir Thomas Eccles began studying neurophysiology at Oxford under a Rhodes Scholarship, and then continued that research at prestigious universities around the world for the next 50 years. Over that time period he was in the center of the world’s most important research on the study of the brain, and won the Nobel Prize for his efforts. He was a die-hard dualist, and was constantly on the lookout for how the spirit somehow connected with the brain. He discovered many of the details of the electric and chemical functionalities of the brain, but never came up with a mechanism for how the spirit could interface with the brain that was both coherent and something that wasn’t disproven by his own research.

Hypothesizing about the relationship between spirit and brain was never outside the purview of mainstream science, and Eccles actually wrote a paper about it in Nature. Quoting Gazzaniga:

Quote

In a 1951 essay in Nature titled “Hypotheses Relating to the Brain-Mind Problem,” Eccles stated that “many men of science find in dualism and interaction the most acceptable initial postulates in a scientific approach to the problem of mind and brain. In such an approach the question arises: What scientific hypotheses may be formulated that bear in any way on the hitherto refractory problem of brain-mind liaison?” He went on to propose such a hypothesis. Although he thought that every perceptual experience is the result of a specific pattern of neuronal activation, and that memory is caused by an increase in synaptic efficacy, for some reason he thought experience and memory are “unassimilable into the matter-energy system.” He proposed instead that the activated cortex has “a sensitivity of a different kind from any physical instrument” and that “mind achieves liaison with the brain by exerting spatio-temporal fields of influence that become effective through this unique … function of the active cerebral cortex.” Wow! That is basically voodoo with fancy language. He had replaced Descartes’s pineal gland with the mysteriously sensitive activated cerebral cortex. Indeed, two hundred years after Descartes, Eccles continued his tradition of dualism even though he spent sixty hours a week working on and recording neurons and had otherwise totally adopted the determinist agenda. It is mind-boggling.

Gazzaniga, Michael S.. The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind (p. 66). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition. 

Since the days of Eccles dualism has continued to fall out of favor among neuroscientists. This isn’t because questions of how mind and brain interface is schluffed off. It’s because the closer we look, the more we see that nothing’s there. This finding is corroborated by completely independent fields of science, such as quantum field theory which offers unintuitive yet extraordinarily strong evidence that if there were unknown forces and particles with the property of being able to interface with the brain in a way that would make a difference in our thoughts and feelings, physicists would have easily discovered it by now. 

On 5/17/2024 at 10:36 PM, BlueDreams said:

But the assumption that we are more than these flesh sacks likely hasn't followed suit nearly as extensively. In recent polls, at least half of scientists believe in a higher power.

Whether there is “a higher power” is a completely different question than whether or not something called a “spirit" exists and has the property of being able to think and interface with a human brain.

While Sean Carroll spends several chapters explaining how physics has disproven the existence of spirits, what he says about God, which is a different question, comes down to this:

Many people may be comforted by the idea of a powerful being who cares about their lives, and who determines ultimate standards of right and wrong behavior. Personally, I am not comforted by that at all—I find the idea extremely off-putting. I would rather live in a universe where I am responsible for creating my own values and living up to them the best I can, than in a universe in which God hands them down, and does so in an infuriatingly vague way. This preference might unconsciously bias me against theism. On the other hand, I’m not at all happy that my life will come to an end relatively soon (cosmically speaking), with no hope for continuing on; so that might bias me toward it. Whatever biases I may have, I need to keep them in mind while trying to objectively weigh the evidence. It’s all any of us can hope to do from our tiny perch in the cosmos.

Carroll, Sean M. . The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself (pp. 149-150). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

 

[Analytics]

I would like to dedicate the song “Johnny Appleseed” by Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros to the wonderful people who have shared their ideas in this thread.

In a very subtle way, the song is about some of the Marxist ideas we’ve talked about--overall Capitalism has done superlatively wonderful things for society, but greed can ultimately kill it. If you like the fruits of Capitalism, we need to be extra nice and generous to the people who do the actual work (if you’re after getting the honey, don’t go killing all the bees).

Additionally, the song touches the main topic of this thread directly with this little line:

Lord, there goes a Buick forty-nine
Black sheep of the angels riding, riding down the line
We think there is a soul, we don't know
That soul is hard to find

 

[mfbukowski]

Never mind.

No I am not saying to forget about it-  Never Mind is actually the answer.

It's Never the mind.

 

Edited May 19, 2024 by mfbukowski

[mfbukowski]

On 5/19/2024 at 8:55 AM, MiserereNobis said:

“Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream. It is not dying, it is not dying”

 

"That you may see the meaning of within...."

-Wittgenstein.

Uh, not really