DCP goes all-in on pseudo scientific quackery

[Imwashingmypirate]

I think there is something in all this stuff. I kind of believe it at a distance because I think my mind can be fragile and freak me out. I've had dreams where I've stood and looked at things in places I don't know and then years later, have somehow ended up visiting those places and got very strong déjàvous feelings. Obviously there was no specific message and nothing exciting happened so it wasn't like I was receiving warnings. I once dreamt I was in a teacher's house. Just standing watching and I said to him when I was next in his class that I dreamt about his living room and I described it and the cat and children I saw and what they were doing and I wonder if he was pulling my leg but he said that that is how his living room looks and he does have a cat that lays on a window sil and his grandchildren visit and play on the floor. There was no reason for the dream. And I. All of these dreams, I am literally standing observing. I'm not part of them.

[High Spy]

I think there is something in all this stuff. I kind of believe it at a distance because I think my mind can be fragile and freak me out. I've had dreams where I've stood and looked at things in places I don't know and then years later, have somehow ended up visiting those places and got very strong déjàvous feelings. Obviously there was no specific message and nothing exciting happened so it wasn't like I was receiving warnings. I once dreamt I was in a teacher's house. Just standing watching and I said to him when I was next in his class that I dreamt about his living room and I described it and the cat and children I saw and what they were doing and I wonder if he was pulling my leg but he said that that is how his living room looks and he does have a cat that lays on a window sil and his grandchildren visit and play on the floor. There was no reason for the dream. And I. All of these dreams, I am literally standing observing. I'm not part of them.

This kind of thing happened a few times many years ago. It’s one thing that clued me in to the fact that there’s more to this world than meets our natural eyes.

[Imwashingmypirate]

I think there is something in all this stuff. I kind of believe it at a distance because I think my mind can be fragile and freak me out. I've had dreams where I've stood and looked at things in places I don't know and then years later, have somehow ended up visiting those places and got very strong déjàvous feelings. Obviously there was no specific message and nothing exciting happened so it wasn't like I was receiving warnings. I once dreamt I was in a teacher's house. Just standing watching and I said to him when I was next in his class that I dreamt about his living room and I described it and the cat and children I saw and what they were doing and I wonder if he was pulling my leg but he said that that is how his living room looks and he does have a cat that lays on a window sil and his grandchildren visit and play on the floor. There was no reason for the dream. And I. All of these dreams, I am literally standing observing. I'm not part of them.

This kind of thing happened a few times many years ago. It’s one thing that clued me in to the fact that there’s more to this world than meets our natural eyes.

I do think we are limited massively in what we already know we can't experience so there must be much more. We already know we don't hear or see everything that other animals can hear and see. I do believe some animals communicate telepathically.

[High Spy]

I do think we are limited massively in what we already know we can't experience so there must be much more. We already know we don't hear or see everything that other animals can hear and see. I do believe some animals communicate telepathically.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/b ... anglement/

Robins make use of quantum entanglement. Bees do weird stuff, too.

[Physics Guy]

I think that the real discussion behind the one about reductive materialism is still important, but that it has moved a long way past its original labels. Our understandings of all kinds of potentially immaterial things, like mind and emotion and perception, have become enmeshed with lots of physiological facts, even if we're still far from understanding the whole story. And our understanding of matter has changed enormously, too. Atoms are not just hard specks, and microscopic physics is an eerie, alien game that might have been made up by Plato on shrooms. So the potentially immaterial is no longer separate from matter, and matter has gone all ethereal. Talking about whether or not everything is material is like saying, "Marry, forsooth!" It's from a long time ago.

The essential issues are still live and important. It's just that the distinction between matter and non-matter has crumbled. It was probably never anything but nomenclature, anyway. The distinction that remains is between simple and complex. Is the ultimate explanation for things just that they are what they are, or is it a long, detailed story of how lots of little moving parts work together?

In some story I read once, a character for some reason raised a theory about how small children think about their own physiology. I don't think it was important in the story at all, just a side remark by one character, but this fictional assertion about child psychology has stuck in my mind long past everything else from that story. The assertion was that small children think their bodies are solid inside, like potatoes.

It seems plausible that kids might think that way. I can imagine that they don't imagine internal organs, let alone cells or biochemistry. Maybe a kid just thinks, "I'm made of me-stuff." Could be. I take it as a metaphor, anyway, for a certain kind of thinking: potato theories.

If somebody says they have an immaterial soul, I'll just bracket away the "immaterial" part as something they probably don't really mean, if it means anything. I'll start asking things like, What do souls do? What can happen to them? Do they have any identifiable substructure?

If anyone starts taking these questions seriously, and tries to answer them, then whatever they say about souls is going to sound like physics to me. It might be wrong, even demonstrably wrong, but the further discussion of souls would be much the same kind of discussion that I might have about flames or sound waves.

What I think is more likely to happen, though, is that someone who likes to talk about immaterial souls is going to insist that my kinds of questions are somehow invalid, for souls. Souls just are. The story ends after the title. It's a potato theory.

To me, the one big thing that we have learned in all of science—not just the biggest single thing, but the one big thing—is that there are no potatoes.

[drumdude]

If DCP’s worldview is correct, all the “ooga booga” immaterial world stuff probably doesn’t follow cause and effect. Doesn’t follow logic. Doesn’t follow anything that would allow us to experiment on it, by design.

You aren’t supposed to put God to the test, after all.

[Rivendale]

If DCP’s worldview is correct, all the “ooga booga” immaterial world stuff probably doesn’t follow cause and effect. Doesn’t follow logic. Doesn’t follow anything that would allow us to experiment on it, by design.

You aren’t supposed to put God to the test, after all.

He always reverts to epistemic distance. His entourage usually goes to the multiple accounts of NDE, extreme parallelism and an internal witness. None of the claims can be independently repeated consistently.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

Well, folks. Not so fast. There might be something to this clairvoyance-worship after all. When I was in Asheville, my wife and I went to the Asheville Community Yoga center, after a breakfast of Wild Harvest Kombucha infused with pre-probiotics, raw honey, and a healthy dose of dharma. While meditating in studio C with baby goats, I had a very clear picture, impossibly unexplainable, of an older gentleman, overweight, bearded and bespectacled, reading something through a monitor of some sort. He was so mad! I knew what I was seeing was true, and not just my imagination.

I don’t know who that man was or why he was so upset, but I asked Ganesh right then and there to send him some zen. I was filled with the light of Saraswati, and knew the man felt better! I hope he has a good day, and enjoys his next meal.

- Doc

[Gadianton]

What I think is more likely to happen, though, is that someone who likes to talk about immaterial souls is going to insist that my kinds of questions are somehow invalid, for souls. Souls just are. The story ends after the title. It's a potato theory.

In Mormonism, there are two theories about this, both of which are opposed to DCPs apostate theories that materialism is false. DCP actually seems to know very little about Mormonism. He's invented his own religion where theologically, Mormonism is similar to protestant Christianity. I'm actually surprised he believes that God the Father has a body. Maybe he doesn't believe it? I've never heard him specifically admit to it.

Folk Mormonism teaches the Russian Doll theory of the soul. Our spirits in the pre-existence came to earth to receive a physical body. But our spirits were "born" or "created" -- this part isn't clear -- but we existed as raw "intelligences" prior to receiving our "spirit bodies". So the intelligence is the most fundamental you, which is clothed with a spirit body, which is clothed with a physical body. But an intelligence is still matter, somehow, the rawest YOU has always existed. This is what most native Mormons believe.

Another theory that I think goes back to Widtsoe, and I think even endorsed by Bruce R. McConkie, but few Mormons know about it, is that intelligence, which is the purest form of matter, is constructed into a spirit body, which is you, and then you as a spirit comes to earth and gets a physical body.

It's just interesting how Mormonism struggles with philosophical questions in their own way. Is it turtles all the way down or is there bedrock somewhere? The second idea wouldn't tend to be popular because folk Mormons are invested in the idea that we've all existed as conscious, thinking entities for eternity as distinctly ourselves.

ETA: this is also a great example of why Mormonism doesn't answer any big questions as Dan falsely claims it does. Mormonism gives you a story to explain other stories, but creates more problems than it solves in the process.

[Philo Sofee]

ETA: this is also a great example of why Mormonism doesn't answer any big questions as Dan falsely claims it does. Mormonism gives you a story to explain other stories, but creates more problems than it solves in the process.

This is a very important point. The more you scratch that itch the further the contagion spreads, not making it lesser and eventually healing it. The deeper you go, the MORE problems exist. And God simply cannot seem to solve it with any kind of revelation. He is intelligent enough to create an entire unfathomable universe, but cannot figure out how to teach humans, let alone communicate to them in any kind of "pure language they can understand" about reality in any kind of depth. It's nonsense how Mormonism has set that one up.