It's much faster to simply point out that mental processes and consciousness, in other words the "identity" of the individual supposedly going to heaven, are intextricably bound up with the physical organic processes constituting his physical body. It is not meaningful to state that this individual's identity somehow survives beyond the destruction of these objects. It wouldn't, for example, make sense to refer to you as an individual without your memories and your experiental basis, insofar as those determine your identity. But memory formation is a physical process and is destroyed with physical death. Likewise, for you to meaningfully have a conscious experience of heaven, you must have an experiental basis, such as sensory data. That, of course, is destroyed at death. It is impossible to argue that some sort of inscrutable mental "stuff" somehow survives with your personal identity intact and carries this inscrutable personal identity to a "place" which you will "experience" after you die. It isn't even possible to articulate the notion without stealing directly from material concepts.

But you're missing an important point. It is possible to disprove the notion that our conscious identity surivives death. Strictly speaking, the notion isn't even coherent.

It's only possible within the constructs of our scientific universe. It is impossible to prove that another ethereal realm as a superset of ours does not exist - people living on a flat world in 2D would be able to discover a coherant set of physical laws about their world but be unable to conceive or access their 3D surroundings. I'm not saying this realm does exist, but as a philosophical point it's difficult to disprove.

So Theologans can justify their belief in an immortal soul as the transcendence from our limited universe to one higher, with adjusted physical laws.

However, even bearing this in mind, I think my logic above hoists them by their own petard, as the belief contradicts itself, and does not rely on any sets of physical laws, except the concept of evolution as an axiom.

Good stuff

Ian

I would LOVE to debate this with you someday DG. No supernatural or stolen concepts, just a plain positive logical argument that the majority constitution of conscious identity is not affected by death.

I am really interested in you expanding on this.

This is good mental masterbation, but it is just as hard to convince someone who consults tarot cards anymore than it would convince a baseball player that his lucky jockstrap that he never washes, gets him home runs in that their superstitions have nothing to do with reality.

Heaven, has existed as a concept, DESPITE WHAT CHRISTIANS/JEWS/MUSLIMS have claimed, long before. And what these cheerleaders of calamity(end times) don't seem to care about, is the necks of outsiders in order to get past the velvet ropes because daddy wants this blood bath to honor him.

But their utopia is hardly original and the "Chosen people" motif is not an invention of monotheism or even polytheism. It is a mundane invention of the species who crapped their animal skins (underwear) and crossed their fingers when they heard thunder.

"Maybe if I sacrifice this cow, the volcano won't explode"

"Maybe if I pray to Allah I can have an orgy in heaven"

"Maybe if I pray to Ganish, I can get multiple hand jobs at the Bunny Ranch for the price of one"

And maybe if I pray to Spiderman I can get his web to trap Fran Dresher(The Nanny) so I can have my way with her.

Xian response:

"Uhhh.... but Jesus died for your sins and you will go to Hell if you don't accept him. I don't understand anything else. Dur..."

One has to wonder, if God intended Evolution to exist, and the Creation was declared "Good", then does evolution happen in Heaven?  Or is it suddenly not Good anymore?

I always have claimed that position, Kevin, I'm surprised you didn't already know.

Emergence is a philosophical proposition which I weakly oppose in toto based on its dependence on psychological time.

I don't have a strong objection to the concept of arising systems in the sense of a framework (and a coherent language) for some model (describing phenomenon) requiring an objective basis (however arbitrary) and well correlated propositions from it. In that context I hold emergence to be trivially true. However, I hold equally that any proposition with a time bias is ultimately flawed and I would argue against it.

Incidentally this has only a little to do with my original post to DG. I would contend several other points regarding consciousness outside the subject of emergence.

DP

LOL.  I AM still confused. WTF are we time creatures ?   I will just say , ONE , all is connected .... But time always completely stumps me .... Geezz , nothing I have read even begins to really explain time for me ..... I don't know where to even start or how to form a usable meaningful basic "time" concept. I have called time the "mystery glue" of existence, but that's just me being cute with words. Lost in space and time ....

It's little wonder why people can and do invent religion dogma, and people believe such obvious B.S.

Funny thing is, I have this feeling that the basic time answer is way simple. What a teaser .... damn!   

Let's not play word games (you said you wouldn't): what you're describing is the creation of emergent processes. You're starting to sound like the creationist opposing evolutionary theory:

'Oh, sure, there's micro-evolution. But macro-evolution? Come on...'

If you can walk five feet, as the old saying goes, you can walk five miles. Emergent processes have been clearly demonstrated in nature (bird flocks, fish schools, etc), and are actively being used in software engineering today. That's right - the study of emergent phenomena is yielding practical results (Hell, Spore - a soon-to-be-released PC game I've been nutty over for quite a while - was built using entirely emergent processes).

Emergence is a fact, and a rather solid one.

I don't personally know enough about neuroscience to lay down the facts for you (perhaps DG will oblige?), but we can intuitively infer easily enough that human consciousness is a physical process by looking at some rather simple pieces of evidence. We know that physical chemical reactions drastically effect consciousness, we know that physical brain injuries and abnormalities effect consciousness, we know that a variety of physical stimuli (most notably violent stimuli) effect consciousness (and can take it out of commission for periods of time, at the least), we know that the brain's physical impulses are different depending on a person's state of consciousness, we know that consciousness is altered depending on the state of one's physical sensory throughout their lives...

We'll now note what's consistent about all of these observations: the fact that physical processes are always involved.

Sure, I guess that doesn't absolutely rule-out the possibility of a 'ghost in the machine', but such a possibility is dismissible as nonsense anyway as it has no evidence to support it.

Oblivion is the black hole that gobbles up myth. Once believed becomes quaint history, much like modern monotheists view the once taken seriously polytheism of the past.

What modern believers fail to consider is what their religion will look like in 1,000 years. If it is still alive, it will be quite different, or it may die, just like the Egyptians once falsely believed that the sun was a thinking entity.

Humans think they do things differently and the only truth to that is that they claim to do things differently to avoid admitting that they don't do anything different. People believed lies to be fact in the past and people still do today.

  Dear furture Indefinite,   The article "suggests" based on one set of bones found in one cave in Romania,  Gene researchers still disagree,  and are still studying/searching for real   DNA/RNA evidence.   Such is the world of science that the current opinion is NO, but they are still looking.

   I stand by my post of no evidence of interbreading,  untill some scientist can convince me otherwise. It will take more then one "suggestion" of one set of bones.  Compare  Shaq O'Neil's bones to MaryLou Retten's bones  and believe they ARE the same species. Your eyes and commen sense say NO,   but DNA/RNA say YES.  

There is quite a difference between your first statement, i.e. “NO evidence that our Cro-Magnon ancestors interbred with their Neanderthal neighbors; NONE” ………..and your follow-up statement, i.e.  “The article "suggests" based on one set of bones found in one cave in Romania…I stand by my post of no evidence of interbreeding, until some scientist can convince me otherwise”.

In short, THERE IS SOME EVIDENCE according to the National Geographic article and more than you acknowledge in your dismissive tone.  And I wonder why it is so important for you to disregard the possibility of our relationship to Neanderthal Man.  Are you a Christian wedded to the idea of human uniqueness?

The Geographic article makes clear that “The skull characteristic noted in the study is related to braincase development… and is found in around half of humans known from the same time period.  You then find it in decreasing frequencies as you go towards modern Europeans.  The research team went on to say:

 “The only way I can explain the anatomy of these fossils and the fossils from a number of other sites across Europe is that there was a fair amount of interbreeding,".  Studies of the remains of other ancient Europeans, including the 24,500-year-old skeleton of a child found in Portugal, likewise suggest Neanderthals contributed to modern human makeup”.

The research is ongoing and given that there is some evidence to link Neanderthal man to Homo-Sapiens it would be best in my view to maintain an open mind until conclusive evidence is available.