Yah, exactly.

Campbell in turn was working off of Jung, who got his Gnostic and Alchemical ideas from, you guessed it, Paracelsus.  Each, in turn, both extended the ideas of his predecessor and acknowledged where they came from.

 

I think we are looking at the same evidence and coming to different conclusions. When I said 'missing the big picture', I didn't mean that atheists don't look at the grand scale, what I'm saying is the atheist inturpets the grand scale differently. 

Yea, we are missing out on the "big picture" wonderfull ilusion you have built up in your own head. If we would only "understand" how your playdough works, we could be as just as peachy keen as you. 

I think that when you are dealing with a concept as bizarre as god you find yourself entertaining all sorts of interpretations of the evidence. But unless you reject the idea of objective reality altogether you have to admit that some interpretations are more valid than others.

I was just trying to address the persistent need that people have to believe in this particular concept that is not necessarily coherent and never has been. Everyone tries to find meaning in life but not everyone finds it in an idea that let’s be honest doesn’t really make much sense in terms of what we know. But it does make sense in terms of what we think should be.

Of course there should be some magic thing somewhere that makes everything make sense, and makes everybody’s life not be a fuckin joke. That’s just a no brainer. But should in one hand and shit in the other and see which one fills up faster.

Hint: the shit hand fills up faster.

BTW did you guys see technology of star wars on the history channel?

 

Okay, the consciousness relies on the illusion to bring experiences.  What good is an illusion if there is no consciousness to percieve it?  What good is a consciousness if  there is no illusion to bring it experiences? They are both interlinked.

Does that clear it up? 

Nope.
Are you implying the apparatus that we believe brings us consciousness does not?
Because, if you are, then why is there no evidence of conciousness, none at all, after the apparatus that provides us with it shuts down?
Furthermore, the tiny parts that the matter gets broken down into, are still matter. Since matter is equatable with energy, just in different parts and in different form, the energy itself is another part of your supposed "illusion" of reality. And, that would everything we perceive an illusion. Including, the perceptions themselves.

The extent of that analogy's application is widely misunderstood, dare I say, underestimated.

The Pauli exclusion principle.

http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PR/v35/i6/p579_1

 edit: the abstract should say enough.

 

If you are talking about the brain, I do believe it brings us consciousness. It is the filter if you will, the vessel of consciousness.

 

 

Like I said, the brain is the filter. Once it shuts down, all the conciousness isn't lost. It is just transfered. Kinda of like taking a slide out of a projector.

 

We percieve through our consciousness. Which is derived from the infinite consciousness. As I said before, consciousness is useless without the illusion.

 

 

I think you misunderstood the point of the analogy. It was synonymous with no one really caring, that is to say, that it's such a pointless notion that it does and won't effect the way anyone would think about something.

"So what if you see blue when I see green? We both classify it as blue." 

In the equation, E=mc^2,

E = physical energy in the physical universe;

NOT supernatural energy in the physical universe.

Theists really seem to have a hard time wrapping their minds around the fact that the energy discussed in Einstein's famous equation has nothing to do with the New Age supernatural energy that supposedly resides in crystals or is transmitted in faith healing.  The energy in E=mc^2 is actual real energy that could be detected as electromagnetic energy, kinetic energy, or some other forms.  There is no mystical spirit energy or pixie dust energy that has anything to do with E = mc^2. 

 

I do recall saying in my essay that the energy will obey the universe's laws of physics.  If it obeys the laws of physics, then it is natural. 

How can I misunderstand the point of something that came to my own mind, as it has many other people, several years ago? I would never have said what I was thinking out loud if not to effect the way we see reality, and same goes for most philosophical minds that have ever posed the question. In my opinion it is and has always been synonymous with the fundamental questions of Solipsistic philosphy. "Who cares" almost surely is the afterthought and not the original point of the analogy.

You're looking way to deeply into this. The analogy was a simple one.

Both things won't have an effect on your life. Very simple. In short, who cares.

I usually don't like to just quote the little end bits to posts, especially ones that were expressed so well, although I had some trouble following it (not your fault, me being tired along with being below this level of vocabulary had me have to read it a few times), I THINK I understand what was said, although I'm probably wrong about it.

Anyway, yeah, I would suspect God would provide the answer, that is to say, if he spoke to us directly. However, that doesn't seem to be the case. Instead, if God really exists, it (God) hides himself, and that's simply lame.

I'm not sure I'm going to debate what you've said here as a whole or not, but this statement is a pet peeve of mine.

Nature "obeys" no laws. Scientific laws are human descriptions of the universe around us distilled into fundamental concepts. To say that nature obeys these laws or descriptions, would be akin to saying that a reporter writing a story of a football game controlls the game's outcome by writing his or her account of the game.

What we call laws of nature are simply our best current distillation of knowledge about how the universe works. The universe will do whatever it is the universe does, with or without us and our descritptions of it - however accurate or flawed they may be.

 

Not at all, if you're going where I think you're going. 

Why indeed, there is certianly no scientific basis for such.

IOW, you've simply anthropomorphised an unnecessary and undemonstratable creator that shares views much akin to yours. How surprising.

A quaint idea that may give you comfort. It does noting for me.

If I had a billion dollars, I'd do two chicks at the same time. I always wanted to do that, man. And I think if I were a billionaire I could hook that up, too; 'cause chicks dig dudes with money. Therefore God exists.

Hey, at least God know's what's important.

Cpt Pineapple,

I think you are a really cool person.  I like you.  

But this nonsense you are spewing is beyond frustrating.  It frustrates  me more than creationism because the creationist is simply adhering to something pre-scripted and defended by loonies and liers, while you are actually using your creative intelligence to come up with this and don't see the pure silliness of it.

I've been thinking of this issue about matter being an illusion for some time, and find that the phrase itself; 'matter is an illusion' to be based in an error that seems very obvious to me.  

Consciousness, experience, and awareness are all macro qualities of the universe that arise in things like brains.  they are processes that occur as a result of the behavior of complex molecules, cells, tissue, etc.  

Our awasreness or consciousness can only create concepts that it has experience with.  That is, the concepts we have are of things in the macrophysical world (what Dawkins calls the "middle world" in his recent work).   The concepts that we call 'quantum menchanics' and related ideas are all based on research that was not possible until certain tools could be created to detect them.  They are simply too small to be experienced because the thing that experiences--the brain--is made of stuff that is much larger than these quantum things.

 Matter is not an illusion so much as it is a different prespective.  Imagine an alien visiting Earth for the first time and watches the activity of one person.  Do you think that the alien could understand, easily, the concepts of culture, society, and the properties and behaviors of these entities by observing one person? I don't thinkso, and the reason is that culture and society exist ina different way than an individual, and it's often hard to predict how a culture will respond by looking a one person. 

The analogy is not very apt, I know.  The point is that matter is seen as solid, particle-like, etc because it behaves that way when looked at with processes that are themselves at the same level of behavior.  If our consciousness arose due to processes that occurred at the sub-atomic level, perhaps our experience would be much different, and we would have to abstract concepts such as solidity and so forth to understand the macrophysical world.  

This concept of consciousness as being a sort-of filter just does not fit the data.  Consciousness is a physical process that arises at the macrophyiscal level by things that have things like brains.  It is a simple consequence of a biological process that developed, over time, the ability to take it's physical surroundings in such a way to make a simulation of what other physical things are around them to better navigate, procreate, and ingest nutrients.  The reason these types of developments were selected is obvious.  

There is no reason to surmise a higher consciousness that experiences through us.  But you may be interested in what the process theologians have had to say about god.  Their view is that god learns and grows in complexity with the universe, as it is a sort of awareness of the universe that grows in complexity over time as well as the thing that initiated it's creation.  Writers such as Whitehead, Hartshorne, John Cobb, David Ray Griffin, etc.  The following is a quote indicative of process philosophy/theology;

and

I am not defending the process theologian position, just alerting you to it.  I read quite a bit about it in graduate school, including Alfred North Whitehead's seminal work Process and Reality.

Check some of it out. 

For everyone else, here's an interesting quote to ponder from Whitehead;

Shaun 

 

The "having a billion dollars" analogy is stupid.

A better analogy can be found in the question: If you already have everything, what's left to want?

 

There can be no motiviation for god to create anything OTHER THAN to ruin perfection. And why would god want to do that?

I, personally, find it necessary to draw on the philosophical idea of a "zombie". I don't know if you are familiar with it, so forgive my explanation.

A zombie is a living, breathing person without consciousness. A zombie is indistinguishable in behavior from a normal human being. Your friends might be zombies. They would act like they had consciousness, but they would really be automatons, enslaved to the intricate web of connections between neurons in the brain. All of the world might be zombies , but you would have no way of knowing. It is impossible to consider "what it would be like" to be a zombie in the same way that it is silly to ask what it would be like to be a teddy bear; in each case we would be projecting our consciousness onto something that doesn't have it.

This is my question to you: can a zombie exist? If so, then "consciousness" is beyond explanation by physical means (a zombie is physically identical to a normal person) and can be equated to a soul. If not, then consciousness is simply the result of connections between neurons in the brain, and thus an "immaterial consciousness" as you seem to be suggesting (since matter is just an illusion) is an incoherent phrase.

If there is a multiverse, what need is there for a god?

 

LOL, no more than there ever was essentially, Todangst. But if he has a cool hand in the furthering of humanity's greatnes of experience through their discovery I'd be happy to love him.

 

Well, I am saying that the consciousness percieves as reality is merely an illusion. So in essence, the only thing that truly exists is the consciousness, and it uses the illusion of the universe to bring it experiences. 

 

This is known as reductionism.  Like saying one of Bach's musical works is nothing but vibrations of piano strings.

 

 

These quantum effects give use the ability to percieve our universe as realitiy. Refer to my previous photograph analogy where the pixels make up the picture, but we do not have to know the pixels are there to experience the picture.

 

 

 I am not sure what you mean by this, please explain.

 

 

 

 

Once again, reductionism.

 

I have not read David Ray Griffin, nor Alfred North Whitehead but I will have to remember to look into them in the future.

But it does mean that there is no role of 'creator' for a god to fill. What 'definition' are you left with?