New age and its problems

[)O( Hytegia )O(]

You miss the point-
The idea is that the FSMcapacitor gremlins have as much evidence supporting it as your God.spirits Or any God. spirits
...
Christianspagans who laugh at it only laugh at themselves. The rest of us just laugh.

Quote mining is fun, isn't it? You took out the entire part where I ascribed it retaining to Science, knowing that I've addressed that matter before and it's value to the post at it's entirety, and hacked at selected pieces in order to throw an insult my way.
I have simpler methods of insulting someone, douchebag.

------------------------------

I don't ascribe to Nicoan's beliefs - but he makes a valid point in his post. But I'm sure you'll give itg a retort worthy of a Creationist ^^.

 

[Aught3]

This is getting very childish. I offered you a debate thread if you want to duke something out, but you are just cluttering up what was a perfectly good thread with petty arguments.

Drop it after my post or I'll lock the thread.

 

[)O( Hytegia )O(]

This is getting very childish. I offered you a debate thread if you want to duke something out, but you are just cluttering up what was a perfectly good thread with petty arguments.

Drop it after my post or I'll lock the thread.

I offered the same thing to him aswell. :|

Anyhow, I'll drop it. It's not my initiative to pick fights anyhow.

 

[borrofburi]

You also mostly ignored my post >.>

Also niocan, you do reject science, you are precisely a wonderful example of the most egregious of the new age problems. Generally speaking niocan, taking any side lowers the average person on this forum's opinion of that side by a very significant amount. I suppose I could point out all your dualism has major flaws, but of course that probably belongs in the dualism thread, where you were told the flaws precisely and insisted they don't exist anyway.

Metaphysics seeks to understand why we experience it

Oh I can answer that. You see, there are these things called neurons, and they have these connections, some of which are to "sensors" that sense the world around them, so these neurons get data about the world around them, and that's how they experience it. But of course you'll say some bullshit about how consciousness exists outside of the physical body and more dualistic crap that belongs back in the dualism thread.

 

[Niocan]

You also mostly ignored my post >.>

I got the message of your apparent self pity and it's inherent appeal to third party athority; I don't say this because the meaning was lost, and I know the faults of the human body and mind. It's just that you seem very deadset on disproving first hand experiences instead of learning to take them as they are: small pieces in the puzzle to solve [while keeping the faults in mind].

Also niocan, you do reject science, you are precisely a wonderful example of the most egregious of the new age problems. Generally speaking niocan, taking any side lowers the average person on this forum's opinion of that side by a very significant amount. I suppose I could point out all your dualism has major flaws, but of course that probably belongs in the dualism thread, where you were told the flaws precisely and insisted they don't exist anyway.

I most certenly do not question the physical implications of understanding through the scientific method; I only question the end results of it's process if there's reason to consider the human error [or bias].

Oh I can answer that. You see, there are these things called neurons, and they have these connections, some of which are to "sensors" that sense the world around them, so these neurons get data about the world around them, and that's how they experience it. But of course you'll say some bullshit about how consciousness exists outside of the physical body and more dualistic crap that belongs back in the dualism thread.

Why would I dismiss the bodies way, on the cellular level, of leaching information from the environment?
Why do you choose to attack the means of the message instead of the message itself? That message, being: Physics is the process to understand the environment we're in, and Metaphysics being the process to understand the mind within. This dualism is used to give order to this discussion, because the terms 'natural' and 'supernatural' are rather poor substitues. If you'd like to set it up a different way, what would you choose?

 

[scalyblue]

metaphysics is a philosophical topic, not a scientific one.

I'm unsubbing from this train wreck, it's been fun but it's rather boring not having a single cogent argument to refute.

 

[Niocan]

metaphysics is a philosophical topic, not a scientific one.

That's exactly my point, and the topic includes this aspect that you're just more then willing to throw away..

 

[)O( Hytegia )O(]

metaphysics is a philosophical topic, not a scientific one.

I'm unsubbing from this train wreck, it's been fun but it's rather boring not having a single cogent argument to refute.

It's because you're looking for something to refute. :| The exact reason this entire topic derailed.

As for the rest - the entire idea is that just because someone has Faith does not mean that they are irrational about science and what you would conceive as Reality and write off thge rest as total and incoherent bull. As long as this distinction is evident, and does not interfere with the person's objective view upon Reality then their belief does not Make them Diluded to facts, or Irrational in all their aspects.

/ending statement

 

[morphles]

i think very simple question needs to be asked:

)O( Hytegia )O(, do you think your beliefs in spirits are rational?
(Preferably answer should be yes or no)

 

[)O( Hytegia )O(]

i think very simple question needs to be asked:

)O( Hytegia )O(, do you think your beliefs in spirits are rational?
(Preferably answer should be yes or no)

Yes-
I believe that to others it would be irrational - and so would I if I had not experienced what I have first hand. However, I am aware of the culmunative problems with Faith and Evidence beyond what I can provide unto myself. The definition says that the Belief itself is irrational.

No-
I acknowledge that this outwards view towards what I believe will bring about criticism and inquiry. The mere fact is that I approach Physical problems, casting all ideals of Spirts aside in order to do the task (a prayer never hurts, on occasion). Likewise, I approach Spirtual matters from a Spirtual standpoint. It is on VERY rare occasion that I ever cross-consult Spirits for Physical problems and vice-versa.
Perhaps the only things I keep from my Beliefs to my Actions are the moral lessons I have learned - such as Loving Others for the sole sake of it.

Is the belief Irrational? Scientifically - Yes.
Does the Belief make the person Irrational? No.

 

[borrofburi]

Are your beliefs based in faith or evidence?

 

[)O( Hytegia )O(]

Are your beliefs based in faith or evidence?

Evidence to myself.
The problem with Evidence is that personal Evidence is not Presentable Evidence. You can flit your hand and discount is as quickly as I can put it forth because it lacks cooberating facts to make it plausible to you. It is up to me to put forth my Belief having evidence - but I never bring it forth as HAVING Evidence for you.
I have never placed it in the position to question evidence.

If this is to go to some kind of state of mind on my part (being of Irrationality):

I have said this all before.
The mere fact that I believe something does not make me Irrational. I would conjecture that everyone in the world has SOME stent of Faith in something without evidence put forth to them. This could be so small that they would never notice it. Probably more than one thing, aswell.
But I digress - the subject is if one believing something makes the person themselves Irrational.

 

[morphles]

The problem with this discussion: irrational has not been defined.

Hytegia:

Now your definition, i think, quite clearly appears to be: irrational person - person totally incapable of any rational thought.

And this seems a like bad definition to me because we have other words for such people i.e. idiot. Because i have seen some quite nutty persons with whom you can reason to the certain level when talking about certain things, they are not idiots, but definitely irrational.

I would define irrational person as person who, when pointed out that he is using flawed reasoning, fails to accept this/reevaluate his logic.
Everyone does mistakes, but if you acknowledge this it is not such a big problem, but if you insists that its not an error when everyone demonstrates you that it is, now thats irrational.

Now you seem to have mismatched terms or apply it selectively: Personal evidence is not evidence, never, ever. Well maybe when there is mountain of real evidence that supports your position you can semi jokingly add your personal evidence. But to propose it as only evidence is nuts. Now of course here you will say that its my personal evidence for me so i believe and its not irrational for me. Not right. You should not take even your personal "evidence" as evidence to yourself. If you do this you fail to see how vulnerable/error prone you/your brain is. You don't try to understand why you really had experiences that you had and instead go to fantasy land that you created during or out of such experiences.

Everyone has all kinds of weird experiences, probably >90% people have what they would call "spiritual experience" during their lifetimes, but being rational you must understand that these experiences are constructs of your brain/imagination they can be created for various reasons and vary greatly. But it doesn't make it evidence.

I.e. following your logic: last night i saw bigfoot now i know this is not evidence so i will not try to prove it, but for me form now on bigfoot is real because i saw it i have my personal evidence and I'm happy with it. Doesn't such reasoning make me irrational? I would be basing my belief( and yes its belief, because there is no evidence) on nothing i.e. on my personal evidence, my bigfoot could be i.e. my eyes playing tricks on me; large drunk guy strolling around fields etc. All kinds of nonsenses. And i would take that as evidence when anyone could show me how such evidence have been erroneous in the past, even photos not only forgettable sights. And when knowing that this type of evidence has been rebutted thousands of times and also knowing that brain or eyes could very easily be tricked, or trick themselves so to speak, to say then that i beilve <super claim> because [only] of <my personal NONevidence> is irrational.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence [Carl Sagan], saying i don't claim anything but believe it personally you just isolate yourself from other people and show that you know you don't have evidence, and pretend that evidence means different things for you and for other people, so you can believe while not claiming anything. That makes no sense.

And again this does not mean that you are incapable of rational though. BUT it shows how you can fail at rational though and not recognize it after people repeatedly point that out to you. And if you fail to see your error at this point/topic it at least makes other people think (and I'd say rightly so) that you'll be likely fail to recognize your errors in other topics, so you are only hurting your credibility.

 

[Niocan]

morphles falls victim to over-rationalization as well ;( Though that was a nice projection of conformity / conversion...
Tell me, is it rational to claim that we understand the mind enough to know our faults from our own [very unused] abilities? Have you ever questioned why such claims of faultiness are used to disempower individuals?

I'm not saying these faults don't exsist, they do and it's largly due to the kinds of food most 'civilized' people eat and the environmental toxins we gather; But to use these faults as counter-claims to all of the ">90% spiritual expereinces" as a blanket rejection is rather... faulty.

There's another hypothesis, and it's base is called Spirituality; So, do you claim perfect knowledge of the mind and continue to swing the unbalenced weapon of rationality, or are you willing to integrate another system of thought to better understand and strengthen the world within? The two systems run in parallel, by the way.

 

[morphles]

Nicoan you should understand NO ONE is claiming we understand our brains totally, BUT our understanding is ENOUGH to not need <super claims> to explain experiences we have. And in those cases there knowledge "is not enough" most probably chance/coincidence is adequate explanation.

You should see videos borrofburi posted somewhere in this thread.

Really there are lots of cases where people can even demonstrate/replicate those supposedly unexplainable experiences. And most if not all of those experiences fail to prove supernatural/spiritual/whatever under strict examination. And you could try reading about such wonderful concept like Occam's razor, why do you need to draw whole f*in unexplainable unknowable bla bla realm/world of spirits and gods and what not then BIG chances are that some time in a future all this will be explained in simple natural means, like thousands of such claims have already been. Especially when your evidence could quite accurately be described: i dreamed about it so it mus be real.

BTW define what do you think over rationalization is? Because in my experience people who use such words use it when they don't like that their unfounded world view is unsupported when examined closely, so they just want you to stop questioning their illogical beliefs and don't want to admit that they have unfounded beliefs.

 

[Niocan]

Nicoan you should understand NO ONE is claiming we understand our brains totally, BUT our understanding is ENOUGH to not need <super claims> to explain experiences we have. And in those cases there knowledge "is not enough" most probably chance/coincidence is adequate explanation.

You should see videos borrofburi posted somewhere in this thread.

I know of the lines of thought being used to discredit a system outside of itself, and why most here approach it as they do.

Really there are lots of cases where people can even demonstrate/replicate those supposedly unexplainable experiences. And most if not all of those experiences fail to prove supernatural/spiritual/whatever under strict examination. And you could try reading about such wonderful concept like Occam's razor, why do you need to draw whole f*in unexplainable unknowable bla bla realm/world of spirits and gods and what not then BIG chances are that some time in a future all this will be explained in simple natural means, like thousands of such claims have already been. Especially when your evidence could quite accurately be described: i dreamed about it so it mus be real.

What I find interesting is the apparent defence being used when these systems of thought [spirituality] apply themselves within instead of without. One invading system eventually displacing the original sounds like psychological colonialism When instead, both working together is far more efficient. Keeping that rational line of thought is a good thing, but learning to apply it using the appropriate system is even better.

BTW define what do you think over rationalization is? Because in my experience people who use such words use it when they don't like that their unfounded world view is unsupported when examined closely, so they just want you to stop questioning their illogical beliefs and don't want to admit that they have unfounded beliefs.

The definition would be the act of encasing yourself withn self-consistant walls of thought, through the misapplication or rather the devioid use of the proper system. Using the self-sustainability of physics to disprove metaphysics is like using the self-sustainability of faith to disprove science; Over-rationalization is just a mirror of over-faith.

 

[morphles]

omg so to say....

Ok first look around, got it? This is reality. Universe encompasses all reality. And we invented science to help explain all this. It works _*VERY*_ well for this. Because it is based in reality. We see something, try to make some explanation for that, then we we make predictions based on that explanation, the we see if predictions are correct. That is the only way to explain reality in any meaningful and useful way. Also there is on nice requirement for explanations/theories: they must be falsifiable. So that we could know when we make mistake. Oh and science is consistent, this might be unexpected to you, but consistency is very good and useful.

Now your spirit world god and similar. It is your imagination. Unless you show that they have any connection with reality. What do you see that makes you pull out explanation containing spirits? what predictions can you make from this explanation? what are results of testing them? Well i bet you don't do any of this. And if so your imagined world has no connection with reality. So there is totally no need of that. There probably just one place there you can pull out your imaginary worlds and beings philosophy that would be. There you can try to wonder why we exists and other such stuff without connection to reality.

If you believe in such ahem spiritual stuff deviations clairvoyance and other such stuff id recommend you to get in fantasy rpgs for a couple of years to see what is what you are implying with such claims as yours, and then see how it reflects reality. In short if what you say where true world would look different. No really think about it for a while.

And there is no duality in explaining how world works there is no this time world works the way the science predicts and this times it works as i imagine. So you can't put your imaginations on equal grounds with science, or clam that believing in them doesn't make you irrational.

To be fair i some time ago also believed in all this bullshit, you know that i noticed? Wll first it all lacked consistency, second it lacked basis in reality. And sometimes i really would want that world would work different, but what can you do life is a bitch, universe works as it works, learn to live with it.

 

[borrofburi]

Hytegia: in many ways morphles already said most of what I was going to say. I can understand the idea that personal experience is evidence, and I would agree that it is; however when we accept it as evidence we must first examine it critically, especially once we've realized the amazing amount of flaws (especially easily exploitable flaws) in our minds, and generally that makes it one of the weaker forms of evidence, especially when it contradicts all other forms of evidence (or, more precisely (in this case), is not at all corroborated by other lines of evidence). You claim to be rational, fine, you rather remind me of a newage version of fundy-me (and call me egotistical, but I don't really think he was terribly irrational), but part of being rational means critical re-evaluation of your own beliefs, even ones you are fairly certain are sound.

So, please, watch the videos I linked (at least the first 5). I also finally remembered this series, which are good (I should know, this post took about an hour because I don't want to link things I haven't re-evaluated), and which I was unsuccessful in finding last time (again, ranked by: important to watch, less important but still related, and not important at all but still interesting):
-One reason why people fiercely believe things despite insufficient justification: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkJc6c3nKMw

-The misinformation effect, only somewhat applicable, it's just yet another way in which our brain conjures memory, it does note that "eye-witness testimony is universally regarded as the weakest form of evidence", or, in the case of you and I, personal-evidence is the weakest (err, second weakest) form of evidence: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJic51MeVaU
---Oh, and this gem of a quote from Sagan: "One million UFO cases since 1947. And yet, as far as we can tell, they do not correspond - any of them - to visitations to the earth by spacecraft from elsewhere. \ Large umbers of people can have experiences that can be profound and moving and still not correspond to anything like an exact sense of external reality." - Carl Sagan
-This is difficult to get the first time through, or was for me but I may be particularly slow; Anyway, more on confirmation bias, and (this is the important part) belief perseverance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoCqftOYHX4

Not really related but interesting anyway:
On why people who should know better still fall prey to peer pressure: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1A9vrsw6Hw



morphles: I object your definition of "belief" as lacking evidence, I would say beliefs are things we believe based on evidence, and faith is belief without evidence; I know the creationists like to conflate them, but they are wrong to do so.

I'm not saying these faults [of the brain] don't exsist, they do and it's largly due to the kinds of food most 'civilized' people eat and the environmental toxins we gather

I don't even know how someone comes to such a poorly reasoned conclusion. Niocan: are you a creationist? That's the only possible way that you can come to this conclusion, either that or you think evolution somehow created a "perfect" brain that is only being held back by environmental factors, which, if you understood evolution at all, you would realize is just asinine; and I am thus forced to conclude that you simply don't understand evolution, or at least its implications. Of course, this comes from the person who asserts everyone in the past was smarter than we are now, even though no one in the past made global communications networks or made it to the moon, or even so much as created iron boats or cars, so I don't know what I expected anyway.

Niocan, you are a fool who has very little understanding of rational thought and critical thinking, as well as science. You really should stfu, go get an education, learn some logic, learn some science, learn the scientific method, learn some critical thinking, and then get back to us, because right now you just make yourself, and *any* position you take, look bad. Honestly, I think that's a disservice to the positions you take and if you really care to defend them you should perhaps get good at rational thought before trying, else wise we simply recognize you as incompetent and your words become categorized in the light of "probably worthless" as well as (unfortunately and a bit misguidedly) the positions you take; though many here would not be so kind to you or the positions you hold.

 

[morphles]

I definitely might be misusing definition of belief, I'm not a native English speaker, and in my language there is no distinction between what you call belief and faith (or i don't know or fail to remember). To be more precise I kinda forgot word faith and thus used belief when probably my definition suited faith more. My bad.

 

[Niocan]

I don't even know how someone comes to such a poorly reasoned conclusion. Niocan: are you a creationist? That's the only possible way that you can come to this conclusion, either that or you think evolution somehow created a "perfect" brain that is only being held back by environmental factors, which, if you understood evolution at all, you would realize is just asinine; and I am thus forced to conclude that you simply don't understand evolution, or at least its implications.

*Sigh* No, I'm not what you consider a creationist for they're just as unbalenced as many here.. I was trying to bring into perspective the fact that our bodies are chemical distillaries and what we put into them has effects on everything within us (to an extent) including our brains. The blood brain barrier is nice, but it's rather foolish to think toxins of any kind should be overlooked and discarded. I didn't say we have 'perfect' minds, and I didn't disregard the faults it has.. You aren't forced to assume anything either, instead, try asking?

Of course, this comes from the person who asserts everyone in the past was smarter than we are now, even though no one in the past made global communications networks or made it to the moon, or even so much as created iron boats or cars, so I don't know what I expected anyway.

Not entirely; The people of the past didn't have the physical distractions we have around us and were able to project their feelings without impedence on things like the sky and symbols. I use their approach of metaphysics, not their understanding of physics, and in this respect... they were far more wise then most people today.

Niocan, you are a fool who has very little understanding of rational thought and critical thinking, as well as science. You really should stfu, go get an education, learn some logic, learn some science, learn the scientific method, learn some critical thinking, and then get back to us, because right now you just make yourself, and *any* position you take, look bad. Honestly, I think that's a disservice to the positions you take and if you really care to defend them you should perhaps get good at rational thought before trying, else wise we simply recognize you as incompetent and your words become categorized in the light of "probably worthless" as well as (unfortunately and a bit misguidedly) the positions you take; though many here would not be so kind to you or the positions you hold.

I bring a different perspective into things but that itself doesn't proclaim I'm irrational; If you don't understand what I say or why, then ask =p.

To morphles: It's been said many times, by both myself and Hytegia, that there's two ways to approach things and it just happens that physics helps most people today; But I know we both seeks a different path, to better understand the world within. This meaning is lost on most, and it's sad, but such is this experience of Earth.