Faith: What's the big deal?

[GUNWOUNDS]

If there's anything better than stretching to drop an old growth forest log after a large low-fat meal, its shooting out razor blades after a chilli drowning! But I digress...

My questions about god go to wanting a scientific explanation for spirits and their quantifiable effect on the physical realm as a foundation for god belief. I don't think that is too much to ask, and I can't accept the possibility of spirits existing without this. Ultimately, anything universally perceivable can be observed, measured or calculated if someone is smart enough and focused enough, so my satisfaction with science comes not from faith.

Ever heard of higher dimensions and what their characterisitics would be like?  Ever read flatland?  If you did you would realize that lower dimensions cant even begin to touch higher dimensions... therefore our scientists will never be able to quantify a "hyper-cube".  So dont hold your breathe.

The only way you would see or quantify a spirit is if it manifested itself in our 3-D world by cross-sectioning but then you would be quantifying "it" ...just its manifestation.  If an angel appears to you in human form thats absolutely useless.  We already know human anatomy.

I am happy with the explanation that consciousness is the by-product of a highly evolved neuro-chemical system. I am comfortable with complexity as a concept. I resent efforts of christians to reign in scientific research to protect their political influence.

A by-product?  Thats a copout.  There is no evolutionary explanation for consciousness.... evolution can explain highly developed automatons but developing a consciousness that merely observes and is "along for the ride" and has no bearing on the survival of the organism seems to be problematic.  When a child touches a hot stove his instinct is sufficient to retract his hand, consciousness isnt needed.  You could program a robot to move its hand when its temperature sensors reached a certain point.  But there's no ghost in the machine no identity.  What i am referring to is the YOU factor.  If you made a clone of yourself exact atomic replica.... it would remember being you, it would have all your memories, it would think like you, etc, but it wouldnt be YOU.  It would live on but YOu would be dead.  That personal consciousness is more than just complex machinery.

The one aspect of existence that mystifies me utterly is optics. Eyes are simply the most amazing biological contraptions, but I suppose that if someone was smart enough to invent a camera, it can't be that complex, if yet amazing.

yes optics amazes me as well.  but what amazes me most is origin of life.  Atheist believe that random chance created a working cell that was the parent to everything on earth.  Yet sentient humans CANNOT replicate a cell even tho we have had the technical know-how for over 40 years.  We cannot even produce the correct right handed amino acids under supposed life conditions.  We only make the inorganic left-handed moelcules.   Refer to the failed Miller-Urey experiment.

, but not as a literally-interpreted personality with human characteristics, although again, metaphorically, a personality can be ascribed. The concept of perfection representing balance actually makes sense in this context, but no other.

No christian says that God has a human personality... you're very wrong if you thought that.  God is definitely not human... he may know  everything about us but anything ascribed to Him is simply anthropomorphisms.  When we say God puts us under His wings we dont mean He is a bird.  So God is very much perfection and balance and does encompass the universe.. but that doesnt preclude Him from attempting to communicate with His creation in a way that we can understand.

Gun

[Darth Kwisatz]

There was a perfectly good link from an old post on this board to an amusing site that explains 10 dimensions in terms and pictures easy enough for a kid to understand. Even in the 10th dimension god is impossible. All I need is a demonstration of a field within the totality of existence other than matter or energy that could give rise to a non-physical presence capable of "creating" physical stuff.

Romans didn't have the ability to build atomic bombs, but we do, so I'm reluctant to write off the future capacity of researchers. I have no doubt that the ability to fabricate cells from base molecules will occur at some future time, but I fear for the consequences. Ditto for artificial intelligence as foreseen by Frank Herbert. Nano technology is a pretty nifty but frightening prospect for the further evolution and design of spheres of complexity generally.

My cat has consciousness, but can't form consonants or write. He is yet an effective and adaptive communicator, capable of independent thought, and conveying abstract ideas. Christians tell me he has no soul. Buddhists tell me he does. Humourists tell me he has nine lives. He's smarter than some vegetables who live in comas at the demand of their religious relatives. From whence does spiritual value or accounting derive? An ancient Chilton's manual called the Bible?

Progress from automaton to sensory preception is as easy as re-wiring a circuit board. If matter and energy can combine spectacularly to give us weather, seasons and landscapes, why can't cells mutate over millions of years? Why can't matter chemically synthesise? Christians have not been able to disprove that respiration is the fuel of life, and is in fact nothing but automatic chemical separation of elements, just as reproduction is the divergent expansion of clusters of cell matter originating from a single fertilised protocell. I'm not getting any evidence of creation there, yet it was believed that birth was the result of creation, despite knowledge of the causes and effects of procreation and centuries of specialised breeding of animals to fabricate new species. There is a logical implication that as more and more gets discovered, more will become possible, and this can be the only motive for christians to fuss over the activities of atheists and try to prevent them learning more. The complexity of man's body of recorded knowledge has always expanded, and there is no reason to suspect that this will cease. Cop outs, well I don't accept the example of the child with its hand on the stove. Lobotomise the child or sever the nerve, and you won't get that reaction. Maybe that was a Nazi experiment...? A machine could be designed with exactly the same complexity of sensors and programming. 40 years of prior experimentation isn't a long time in the pantheon of human existence either, and failure always precedes progress.

"I the lord your god am a jealous god. You shall have no other gods before me". I have a jealous cat, but he's not a creator of anything but fertiliser. Both would seem to have a personality simply by the attribute of jealousy, and god must do if he is a desirous sentient as you suggest. How else could he perceive and act, unless he was the spiritual equivalent of seaweed or John Lennon's fool on the hill? That sounds more like an ancient credo for the conquest of Egypt, Greece and Rome who had their own perfectly fine and far less malevolent gods, thank you very much.

A clone could not possibly have my memories, as it would not have had my experiences. You are thinking of a ghola. I must get myself an Orange Catholic Bible so that I can keep up with your arguments! It would be interesting to see if such a clone though, had my personality. A possible disproof to astrology could be to extract one embryo from a set of twins, freeze it and delay its birth to a birth sign that conflicts with the one of the earlier born. I've never had two cats with the same personality either, so go figure. Machines develop "personalities" through divergent patterns of use and abuse too. Hard drives get imprinted. Engines develop specific wear points, no two trees are identical, gun barrels wear in unique ways and imprint bullets discharged from them. Ballistics was a science accepted by courts in the same year that Pluto was discovered. Trees grow differently according to climatic conditions, and in varying conditions this affects their growth. Growth rings in the trunk and even the shapes of leaves and branches bear testimony to this. Personality as a variable of complex neuro chemical processes and history, genetic coding and so on is no great leap of faith in science.

Finally, if we say we are children of the universe, that doesn't mean to say there is literally a sentient creator god.

[Kokiri-Mentat]

Hey guys, I'm just the new kid on the block. 

here's an article I found on  Time magazine website which you might find enlightening.

it addresses more where faith doesn't belong. The author references the common assumption that "Christian = republican" among other things.  for the record agree with much of what the author says which is in essence "I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."... or something like that.

*edit*

sorry that first part was not at all where you guys were in discussion (i was in a hurry that day).

If you made a clone of yourself exact atomic replica.... it would remember being you, it would have all your memories, it would think like you, etc, but it wouldnt be YOU.  It would live on but YOu would be dead.  That personal consciousness is more than just complex machinery.

A clone could not possibly have my memories, as it would not have had my experiences. You are thinking of a ghola.

Experience and memory are not mutually inclusive.

(feel free to skip this long paragraph if you have no problems with previous statement.)  A clone in the sense of the genetic code of oneself being used to build another person is different than the idea of recreating oneself atom-by-atom.  A "Clone" as Darth Kwisatz uses the word carries the implications that the original person and the clone person share identical genetic code, nothing more.  "Clone" as Gunwounds uses the word is one step further in the duplication of a being because he implies that one has been duplicated at the atomic (and perhaps even sub-atomic) level.  Thus things such as scars and calluses would also be present in the atomic clone, unlike the genetic clone. Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe that the teleportation in Star Trek worked by reconstructing individuals from the atom up, in the desired new location .  So imagine you were teleported like in Star Trek but in stead of deconstructing before reconstructing, they merely reconstructed you using new matter rather than reassembling the original matter.  Realizing that memories are stored within the organic brain and not the intangible human mind, then the resulting atomic clone would have all of the stored memories of the original and thus perceive them as past experience even though they were not his own experiences; thus the atomic clone in question is (in his own mind) the same.  After the point of creation, the human and the atomic replica cease to be the same person (as gunwounds points out) since their empirical experiences diverge at that point.  Gohla's were never the exact same person as before because they all had unique life experiences preceding the realization of their past-identity.

The difference between the Gohla and the atomic clone is that the Gohla realizes that he is a different individual than the original.  The atomic clone, unless told otherwise, would not.

This is essentially just a different version of the brain-in-a-vat scenario which goes back to Descartes, which really goes back to the cave allegory in Plato

[Darth Kwisatz]

Welcome, etc.

I might despise trekkies (whilst being a closet fan of Q), but, (and I was an unheralded newbie a month or so ago), there's HUGE value in what you say, which you must know just from having visited and entering the fray.

In the end it comes down to nature versus nurture. It weaves in to other threads about faith and perception of consciousness and what it means to be alive, and in this case a descendant.

My experience of kids is that, yes, they will inherit the least likely traits, mannersisms, looks, etc.

The fundamental question is this: "If I lived on this Earth again, would I live exactly the same life?" Are there intrinsic and inalienable, or else genetic values, or are we all products of our time?

I've personal answers to this question and I'm sure evryone does. I'll post mine in due course. I know I can be a real prick when someone posts something stupid, but on this question there cannot be any retort. From whence does one's perceptions, faith, beliefs etc come from? I mean this not voyeurism. This is curiosity at its heart.

[Acriku]

As far as clones and memory/experience goes, I would think clones have the same neurons and genetic instincts and therefore start out as the same person that you were at the time of cloning, but as soon as the clone is conscious then s/he becomes a different person because s/he is having different experiences from that point on. It might take a while to be noticeably different than you, but it will have its snowballing effect eventually.

[Darth Kwisatz]

I don't really despise anyone, but it's a great word. However it looks a bit brutal on the screen...

[Kokiri-Mentat]

I'm not really a trekkie, so no worries, but my friend bought this book called the science of star trek, and it mentioned that in order to reassemble a pound of matter with the excact atomic/molecular structure as before (like in teleporting a person) that the energy required to do so would be equivalent to all of the energy exerted by every single human being on earth during a 24 hour period.  I dunno how they figure those numbers, and I never had to take physics, but that sounds like a lot of heat and kinetic energy. 

speaking of teleporting, I read somewhere that  a lab (in europe ?) recently teleported a molecule a couple of milimeters.  anybody read that story?

[Darth Kwisatz]

If you figure out how to fold space, let me know. I think that would be cool. I think melange would mess with my head too much though.

[Egeides]

speaking of teleporting, I read somewhere that  a lab (in europe ?) recently teleported a molecule a couple of milimeters.  anybody read that story?

They try to teleport stuff since a while. They started with little (an electron and its spin??), and seem to grow and "teleport" over longer distance. But what they teleport isn't really "matter", it's information about the matter.

So I teleport some map of the molecule somewhere else... and it's reconstituting itself there. I don't want this tried on me for now :P

[TMA_1]

I heard about what Richard Dawkins had to say (or at least partially), and I have found his arguments to be very similar to other athiests arguments. The flying spaghetti monster and other fruitless attempts to whittle off a specific kind of truth.

the problem I have with the Dawkins model of religious issues, is that he tackles the topics from his specific point of view. He debates a certain kind of christian, a certain conceptualization of God, a certain theology. He creates boundaries and asks christians to enter into his lair, and as soon as they enter they are defeated by the logic that he creates within his own boundaries.

Atheists like Dawkins are on the hunt to destroy what they see as something harmful. They dont seem to realize that people will always try to monopolize the "truth". politically infused religion is only one means to an end of mind control. You can see similar meme's when looking at Stalin's Russia. He mutated the communist country into a grand cult of personality around himself, with purely political motives to control the truth as he saw it.