I hate the title of the thread. I know you are looking for a natural explanation for what is. But this is the problem. I think it is wrong to keep the word "god" because it comes with so much superstitious baggage.

That word needs to be KEPT in the same way we rightfully put Thor and Isis in the category of bad claims. It is a relic of our ignorance which should be kept around like the Holocaust museum should be kept around to remind us what not to do.

It is OK to say we don't know. Theists would argue if that is the case, then you cant rule out "god".

Yes we can rule out this absurdity. Because the over all motif of the "god" word is that a human like being without a body or brain with magical powers exists.

Just because we don't have all the answers doesn't mean that our NATURAL wishful thinking won't lead our species to falsely fill in the gap with a human like super hero.

The word god needs to be treated like the plague in reference to reality and only used in the context of Harry Potter.

No worries. I get it. As much as I love Sam Harris, his fascinations with Buddhist meditations drives me nuts knowing he is an atheist.

My point is there is no control. There is a language scientists use to describe our observations.

That is something I have no expertise on. But, I don't think it takes Einstein to know that the the claim of the Egyptian sun god Ra was total bullshit.

Well Einstein had a concept of god that pretty much came down to “the universe and how it works”. That idea is fairly close to the question in the OP. Certainly, that god does not care what you do with your dick (except if you put it in a light socket. Then the electromagnetic god will have an opinion and you may be lucky enough to know the consequences before you die – or not).

That much having been said, yah, the electromagnetic force is the only one that you need to pay any attention to on the level of biology or chemistry. Past that, the idea that electrical charges come in integer units is kind of borked on lower levels. Sure, electrons and protons have -1 and +1 respectively.

However, it turns out that on a lower level, a charge of 1/3 seems to be basic.

Realistically though, that is just because scientists grabbed the idea of integer charges before they knew about quantum dynamics. So you could call the smaller charge the basic unit and the math would still work out right.

High energy physics experiments find lots of stuff that is not fully explained but for common use, all matter is composed of three particles.

Electrons with a -1 charge.

Up quarks with a +2/3 charge.

Down quarks with a -1/3 charge.

Neutrons are composed of Up/Down/Down which sums to 0.

Protons are composed of Up/Up/Down which sums to +1.

If you really wanted to carry the logic through, the the electron would have a charge of -3/3. It doesn't really matter though. The math still works out just fine either way.

Aside from what's already been written so far, I'll just say that no, EM is not the only force to consider. They all come into play, though in different ways. Just like days are not the only measures of time, since there are also years (seasonal cycles) and milliseconds (many cellular processes, such as nerve impulses).

The nuclear forces are what determines the type of atom, be it Hydrogen, Carbon, Oxygen, Nitrogen, or other. So, they are relevant even to chemistry/biology, although they are usually treated as constants, but not always (radiometric dating of fossils, for instance, or radiological medicine such as X-ray or MRI (remember when it was called NMRI, and the N stands for Nuclear; they took it out because it sounded scary to the public, but it doesn't change the fact that nuclear forces are relevant to this technology, even if most of the work is done by giant magnets).

Next, who can honestly afford to ignore gravity in their life? I mean, seriously, think about it for a second.

[Edit: Must have been late. I was thinking about nuclear medicine (injection of radioactive materials, and detecting the radiation from inside the person), and for some reason wrote about x-rays. I guess they're sort of related (often a non-radioactive contrast agent is injected to help get better x-ray images), but x-rays themselves are entirely EM-based.]

It annoys me a little how in that Marquis' video they call vacuum 'nothingness.' Nope, vacuum is much greater somethingness than all matter and energy of visible and tangible universe. Most of the mass property of atoms comes from there, and who knows what else - the basic forces themselves, I think. I wonder when scientists will discover a natural principle by which atomic matter dissolves back into the primal vacuum. If there will be any scientists by then.

I don't know if you care about esotericism enough to be interested in details. Suffice it to say, that according to it these forces all undergo periods of relative activity and inactivity and they bring many characteristic associated phenomena in and out of manifestation. Mostly cultural phenomena, which includes both periods of increased faith and increased rational thought. This esoteric understanding things as a whole takes any student's mind away from emotional worship towards complex study and figuring out what the hell does that paragraph mean.

I have an issue with a common Buddhist practice, that I had heard about, then witnessed in practice in SE Asia (either Thailand or Laos, or both, not sure now).

This is where they put birds in small cages, then for some money they let people free the birds to get Karma points.

It reminds me of medieval Catholics selling indulgences.

Buddhist teaching is also way too obsessed with suffering, IMHO.

OTOH, many sayings attributed to the original teacher are very enlightened, especially for the period, and would not be out of place in a serious free-thinking, sceptical context.

I also enjoy remembering when we accepted some offerings from some Buddhist monks, while we were sitting at a table in the grounds of a temple in Thailand - actually second-hand offerings from the morning parade, stuff they didn't particularly want, such as packets of crisps....

Stephen Hawking seems to think gravity is the boss, based on his documentary on the history of the Universe I watched recently.

TG,

I definitely agree with you about Sam Harris. He does get too much flak from people seeing him as giving too much respect to the 'woo' aspects of the tradition, which he has repeatedly taken pains to explain is not what he is doing. I think he sees the strong probability that in their long exploration of the Mind from the inside, they have come up with many useful and significant techniques and insights, which should be able to be further pursued by proper empirical research.

I keep trying to convince my chat-mate Brian37 that Harris is scrupulously filtering out the 'woo' for the nuggets of 'gold' that could be lurking there.

I have skimmed a bit of Chalmers' stuff, and not entirely comfortable with his approach.

I hope their response is not "people just make up lots of random stuff and so by chance some of that random nonsense is also observing their own person from the outside." Because it would have no logic. 

On the contrary, I think this is very unusual. We spend all our lives observing the world in first person. Unless they work in showbusiness, people are not used to observe themselves externally. It may be almost as awkward as hearing one's own recorded voice. We even spend our dreams in first person view. I hope the psychologists realize, that soMETHing extraordinary must be going on. Can you point me towards any resources on that debate?