Following the Sprit and Echolocation

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MG 2.0
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Re: Following the Sprit and Echolocation

Post by MG 2.0 »

dastardly stem wrote:
Thu Sep 22, 2022 5:06 pm
What on the quantum level is spirit material?
That’s an excellent question.

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MG
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Re: Following the Sprit and Echolocation

Post by Rivendale »

According to Mormonism spirit material is refined matter. And we have discussed elsewhere in this forum how Sean Carroll has demonstrated that particle physics have discounted (at least up until today) the existence of a "pilot" particle that interacts with matter. It is impossible to demonstrate the non existence of something. This seems to be the haven the apologists like to hang out in. The idea of a god that is bound by natural laws tends to create a fundamental question involving gods in general. If physical laws are some sort of boundary maintenance , who made that boundary? Is there another creative force higher up on the celestial ladder? And if bound by natural laws how does Mormon god know he isn't breaking some unknown naturalistic rule?
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Re: Following the Sprit and Echolocation

Post by dastardly stem »

MG 2.0 wrote:
Thu Sep 22, 2022 5:17 pm
Earlier you said we had the tools to determine if there is a spirit in man. Apparently you are now agreeing that we don’t have those tools.

And since we don’t have the tools you then make a default assumption that man doesn’t have a spiritual nature at his/her core.

That’s a leap of faith.

Regards,
MG
I overstated it and I apologize. But that's not a leap of faith. We don't need any assumptions to say there is no spirit in man. You have all the assumption, MG.
dastardly stem wrote: ↑Thu Sep 22, 2022 11:09 am

I wouldn't know what a world without evil would be.
That’s critical to the whole conversation.
No it's not. We have two separate perspectives here. It doesn't matter if you can conceive of a world with no evil. I can conceive of it. BUt it's also quite irrelevant to the issue as I see it.
And I’m pointing out that if there is a God there may have been no other way in order to create this world that we inhabit.

God may very well operate through natural law.
I can concede millions of times that philosophically, if you will, anything is possible. Pointing out it's possible doesn't give us any hope that it is real or a valid explanation supported by anything but your suppositions.
I’m arguing that He created the natural world.
Alright...and is God living in a natural world now? Is He a part of something supernatural (whatever that might be)?
Not on the point of God being a naturalist…and that this may be the ONLY choice for why we see the creation as it is WITH God as the author of that creation.
Creation of what? If God created the universe, that's something. If he didn't, then there's no needed explanation for earth's explanation. But God apparently lives near another star (in the universe?). This is not easy to explain away--all these odd Mormon claims, MG. You seem to hope that traditional Christian arguments for God work for Mromonism. I don't see that they do, generally. They're made to establish a whole other character than the God of Mormonism.
That’s an excellent question.
But you see, it still boils down to your hope that any of this is true. You really don't have an argument, it seems to me. And seeing as you already had claimed one needs to look beyond or outside reason and logic to find God, I don't really expect you to...But then you say things like God is more likely considering all the data than not. You seem stuck speaking out of two sides of your mouth.
“Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”
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Re: Following the Sprit and Echolocation

Post by dastardly stem »

Rivendale wrote:
Thu Sep 22, 2022 6:51 pm
According to Mormonism spirit material is refined matter. And we have discussed elsewhere in this forum how Sean Carroll has demonstrated that particle physics have discounted (at least up until today) the existence of a "pilot" particle that interacts with matter. It is impossible to demonstrate the non existence of something. This seems to be the haven the apologists like to hang out in. The idea of a god that is bound by natural laws tends to create a fundamental question involving gods in general. If physical laws are some sort of boundary maintenance , who made that boundary? Is there another creative force higher up on the celestial ladder? And if bound by natural laws how does Mormon god know he isn't breaking some unknown naturalistic rule?
Yep, we have had those discussion in the past.

Carroll:
Claims that some form of consciousness persists after our bodies die and decay into their constituent atoms face one huge, insuperable obstacle: the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely understood, and there’s no way within those laws to allow for the information stored in our brains to persist after we die.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/gu ... -the-soul/

Carroll suggests we know fields and particles...if there were something else, like spirit or supernatural interacting with our natural known world, we'd see it and know it. The likelihood of something else falls if we have a knowledge of the laws of physics underlying everyday life.
“Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”
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Re: Following the Sprit and Echolocation

Post by MG 2.0 »

dastardly stem wrote:
Thu Sep 22, 2022 7:22 pm
It doesn't matter if you can conceive of a world with no evil. I can conceive of it. BUt it's also quite irrelevant to the issue as I see it.
Actually, I CAN’T conceive of a world with no evil. It’s part and parcel of the natural world. You are saying that you can conceive of a world without evil but are unwilling or unable to describe it.

I think that says something.

The problem is relevant to the issue at hand. Unless I’m mistaken you are associating the evil in the world with the non existence of a benevolent God.

Regards,
MG
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Re: Following the Sprit and Echolocation

Post by MG 2.0 »

Rivendale wrote:
Thu Sep 22, 2022 6:51 pm
According to Mormonism spirit material is refined matter. And we have discussed elsewhere in this forum how Sean Carroll has demonstrated that particle physics have discounted (at least up until today) the existence of a "pilot" particle that interacts with matter. It is impossible to demonstrate the non existence of something. This seems to be the haven the apologists like to hang out in. The idea of a god that is bound by natural laws tends to create a fundamental question involving gods in general. If physical laws are some sort of boundary maintenance , who made that boundary? Is there another creative force higher up on the celestial ladder? And if bound by natural laws how does Mormon god know he isn't breaking some unknown naturalistic rule?
This conversation is had over and over.

https://wheatandtares.org/2013/02/09/is ... kend-poll/

Whatever the truth is one way or the other, it is what it is.

And the fact of the matter is that we don’t know what the is is for a fact.

Speculation is fun. 😉

Regards,
MG
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Re: Following the Sprit and Echolocation

Post by Physics Guy »

As a matter of fact our information does persist past death, as Carroll must know—it's an undergraduate point. Deterministic causality means that every detail of the present and past is always encoded, in a one-to-one way, in the future. Sufficiently advanced aliens could in principle reconstruct my personality, centuries in the future, by disentangling it from fantastically precise measurements of everything within a few light-centuries of Earth. They could probably get a close-enough representation of my life, in fact, from measuring in a much smaller volume of space.

What is preserved is only a record of my life, however, not my ongoing pattern having new experiences. Even if those curious aliens did reconstruct my whole life after my death, down to all the thoughts and feelings I ever had, the story that they reconstruct would still have ended at my death. Past that point, no new consciousness events in my brain would be recorded anywhere in this universe, because they never happened in this universe.

On the other hand, conceivably those quixotic aliens could then edit and process their data a bit more, in order to resolve the counterfactual historical question of what I would have gone on to do, and think, and feel, and see, and so on—if I had not died at that point. Working out what my experiences would have been, if I hadn't died like that, would itself be a kind of afterlife for me.

It's not clear that there would be a unique way of pushing me on past death like that. The aliens might have to make choices about exactly how I went on after death, and these choices might affect who exactly I actually was in this delayed afterlife. If the aliens distorted my soul when they continued my pattern like that, though, it might not be anything so new for me. Little random events have influenced me all my life, after all.

So aliens could in principle give me a simulated afterlife. Since consciousness is a matter of software, not hardware, the issue of simulation is moot. I would be living again after death, making new choices, having new experiences.

Perhaps there are some UFO cults somewhere that do hope for something like that. Most believers in life after death do not look to aliens for it. Instead they generally propose that it is something outside the universe—God or karma or whatever—that is keeping a copy of all our data, and will boot us up again in a whole new world (new to us, anyway).

The point about the aliens only shows that an informational soul can in principle have eternal life no matter what happens to whatever hardware hosts it in this world. Carroll's point is strong about disproving spirit as substance, and also about life not persisting naturally within this world after death, barring spectacular interventions by aliens. To suppose that this disproves life after death in most traditionally imagined forms is only begging the question, however. If there is a Heaven, it is not a zone of space just beyond Saturn's orbit (sorry, Dante), and "going to Heaven" is not a matter of ensuring that any "fine matter" drifts out to there.
Last edited by Physics Guy on Thu Sep 22, 2022 8:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Following the Sprit and Echolocation

Post by drumdude »

Physics Guy wrote:
Thu Sep 22, 2022 8:52 pm
As a matter of fact our information does persist past death, as Carroll must know—it's an undergraduate point. Deterministic causality means that every detail of the present and past is always encoded, in a one-to-one way, in the future. Sufficiently advanced aliens could in principle reconstruct my personality, centuries in the future, by disentangling it from fantastically precise measurements of everything within a few light-centuries of Earth. They could probably get a close-enough representation of my life, in fact, from measuring in a much smaller volume of space.

What is preserved is only a record of my life, however, not my ongoing pattern having new experiences. Even if those curious aliens did reconstruct my whole life after my death, down to all the thoughts and feelings I ever had, the story that they reconstruct would still have ended at my death. Past that point, no new consciousness events in my brain would be recorded anywhere in this universe, because they never happened in this universe.

On the other hand, conceivably those quixotic aliens could then edit and process their data a bit more, in order to resolve the counterfactual historical question of what I would have gone on to do, and think, and feel, and see, and so on—if I had not died at that point. Working out what my experiences would have been, if I hadn't died like that, would itself be a kind of afterlife for me.

It's not clear that there would be a unique way of pushing me on past death like that. The aliens might have to make choices about exactly how I went on after death, and these choices might affect who exactly I actually was in this delayed afterlife. If the aliens distorted my soul when they continued my pattern like that, though, it might not be anything so new for me. Little random events have influenced me all my life, after all.

So aliens could in principle give me a simulated afterlife. Since consciousness is a matter of software, not hardware, the issue of simulation is moot. I would be living again after death, making new choices, having new experiences.

Perhaps there are some UFO cults somewhere that do hope for something like that. Most believers in life after death do not look to aliens for it. Instead they generally propose that it is something outside the universe—God or karma or whatever—that is keeping a copy of all our data, and will boot us up again in a whole new world (new to us, anyway).

The point about the aliens only shows that an informational soul can in principle have eternal life no matter what happens to whatever hardware hosted it in this world.

One unsettling thought is that, if some advanced civilization or external force is able to recreate you, as soon as you die you will cross those thousands, millions, or billions of years in an instant and wake up to that new life. It will pass as quickly as the 14 billion years before your birth did.
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Re: Following the Sprit and Echolocation

Post by Physics Guy »

Yep. Rip Van Winkle with a vengeance.
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Re: Following the Sprit and Echolocation

Post by dastardly stem »

MG 2.0 wrote:
Thu Sep 22, 2022 8:09 pm


Actually, I CAN’T conceive of a world with no evil. It’s part and parcel of the natural world. You are saying that you can conceive of a world without evil but are unwilling or unable to describe it.
Ok. A world without evil is a world where everyone loves each other and take care of each other. People and animals don’t die, they simply get beamed to heaven after some decided upon stint on earth. People don’t get hurt by natural disasters because god, on this conception, made everything to work smoothly. So it’s a world without death and without the conception of mistreating people. Simply conceiving of something is quite easy.
I think that says something.

The problem is relevant to the issue at hand. Unless I’m mistaken you are associating the evil in the world with the non existence of a benevolent God.

Regards,
MG
There is evil in this world. There is no evidence for god outside the hopes and dreams of people. It’s more likely this world exists on the basis of there need be no assumptions for a naturalist position other than we are actually experiencing reality. There are tons of assumptions one has to accept in order to accept your position.
“Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos
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