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@Snoopy
Terms! In away fundamentalism was the default belief of Christians for nearly 2000 years. It just didn't need a name until recently when non-fundamentlism arose.
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@Fallaneze
I would say the most relevant things we both 'know' is that the universe is 'fine tuned' and consciousness has only been observed associated with physical brains. Which of those is the clincher?
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@Fallaneze
It's probably the same information you have. Is there something you know I don't?
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@secularmerlin
@Fallaneze
If you ever find a perfectly rational person, ask him!What would a perfectly rational person's epistemic approach be?
The most rational approach would be to withhold belief until a claim can be demonstrated.
True, but I don't think that is how human minds work. Recall the OP asked about belief. Humans have hunches and believe things in excess of what they can prove. I think we sometimes fib and claim that we are hyper rational, but we aren't.
I am so tempted to say that I have an open mind about consciousness and the origin of the universe. With my hyper rationalist Vulcan hat on i concede that in the absence of proof all things are possible (captain). But do I believe the universe comes from consciousness? If I am honest, no i don't - I think it's a dumb idea.
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@Snoopy
I think it reflects on how badly the phenomenon is understood. Basically it is necessary to have terms to distinguish between Muslim fanatics and muslims who are not fanatical. 'Moderate' is the word that has emerged for the latter group and hatever its defects we are stuck with it. Many Muslims don't like the term because it suggests they are not as religious or pious as the extermists. Such Muslims often refer to thmseles as simply 'muslims' and deny that the fanatics are Muslims at all - hence Erdogan's quote that 'there are no moderate muslims', which as often misconstrued in the west as supporting extremism but was in fact disowning it.
Just as fundamentlism has always been a strand within Christianity, Jihadism has always been a strand within Islam. It pretty much disappeared in the late C19 and early C20, but it has clearly made a comeback and now holds power - or exerts considerable influence in many countries and regions.
The reason a group of Muslims killed over 200 Sri lankans is not because there is a verse in the Koran - its because something has made a particular interpretation of that passage gain acceptance with a significant minority of Muslims.
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@Fallaneze
My epistemic standard for "sufficient evidence" is whether the claim has more information indicating that it's true rather than untrue and vice versa.
I don't think that one judges which side of an argument 'has more information' in a strictly rational fashion. We have conscious and unconscious biases. I am damn sure you and I have exactly the same information regarding the role of consciousness in the origin of the universe yet we reach completely different conclusions.
It's less to do with the objective quantity if information than the subjective weight we give it. For example, we both know consciousness has only ever been observed associated with physical brains. I think that counts against consciousness being the origin of the universe big time. You, presumably, don't think it is particlarly relevant.
We aren't robots or computers - we are illogical, emotion driven animals.
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@Fallaneze
You asked if people believe "that the universe originated from consciousness". Secular said no - so is a poll really all you want, or do you want to argue? Like SM, I don't know how the universe originated; that makes me a no because I don't believe the universe originated from consciousness.
Whether I believe it might have originated from consciousness is a very different question. I believe it might, but I don't believe it is likely, nor a useful hypothesis to pursue.
I think evolution is a useful parallel. For a long time the idea that life was the product of consciousness held sway - but eventually Darwin and others showed how what appears to require foresight and planning doesn't - ordinary causality suffices. I believe the same will happen with the origin of the universe (and consciousness). I don't know that is true, but it is what I believe.
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@Stephen
It appears you take the view that it is the jihadist interpretation that is the correct one and terrorists are obeying what the koran and hadith teach.So that is ALL muslims, extremist and so called "moderate muslims" alike read exactly the same Quran, Hadith & Surah. We have to ask then which muslims among ALL of these muslims are reading the quran and interpreting it correctly. Do you know?
That is the view of 'non-moderate' Muslims, but it is not accepted by all scholars nor is it reflected in the actual behaviour of the vast majority of Muslims.
Instead of pointing out the obvious - ie the presence of passages that permit of jihadist interpretation - it would be more useful to examine why 'fundamentalist' interpretations of Islam have gained increased significance over the last few decades.
The koran has not changed for over a thousand years - I don't think Sri Lankan Muslims suddenly came across the verses you highlight and decided to act on them. Nor did the Sultan of Brunei open his Koran for the first time last week.
Earlier in the C20 the musim world was moving towards liberalism and secularism (a few hundred years after the west, but better late than never!), but more recently we are seeing the hard line gaining significance.. I may be wrong, but there seems to be an upswing in hardline religion generally, eg conservative christianity in the west (esp. the US), militant hinduism in India and Buddhism in Myanmar.
Of course there are passages in the Koran that permit a jihadist interpretation, but there must be reasons why those interpretations are - at least apparently - gaining ground. In my view, the problems posed by religious extremism are not fully explained by the presence of this or that passage in the Koran.
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@Stephen
You know what an ordinary Englishman like? Ordinary muslims are pretty similar.
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@Stephen
My late wifes's family... just about every Musllim I've met.... that sort.
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@Wrick-It-Ralph
What a shame its not clear what 'place holder' or 'logical set' means.A word is merely a place holder for a logical set.
'Logical set' is particularly interesting... are there illogical sets?
Also that might be true for nouns, but does it apply to, say, adverbs?
I've noticed people tend to say 'merely' (occasionally 'only' or 'just') when it's actually quite deep and complicated...and possily not even true!
I even go back through my posts and remove any 'merely's' etc... it's good for the soul.
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@PGA2.0
It doesn't have to make sense.Realization of what - the universe is here via random chance happenstance? How does that make sense of origin?
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@Stephen
The quran demands and indeed orders that muslims create a one world Islamic state : "until all religion is for Allah"..
If I say 'it's not that simple' does that make me an Islamic apologist? I'll risk it and say 'It's not that simple'. Unfortunately it takes a lot longer to explain why it's not so simple than to over-simplify things! And as you certainly know that already and no-one else really cares I can't be bothered.
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@Stephen
I doubt it was me, at least not in that sort of context.. I think I remember you having used this expression "in self defence"
i think it's interesing to speculate what drives empires. European empires - such as the British, french, spanish andotuguses undoutedly spread Chrisianity across the globe, but they were not motivated by missionary zeal to spread the word. There isn't much in the koram about actively expanding - the emphasis is on defense, which may relect that Islam was primarily used to maintin internal cohesion afer the emire was established rather than growing it.
But if that was the reason Islam was invented, does that mean Muslims today are secretly planing for world domination? I would say that some certainly do think like that, but it's not my experience that ordinary muslims crave for a world caliphate!
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@Stephen
Never heard of the word, but you did write "I don't hate or fear Christianity in the slightest" so I don't think you are a 'christianophobe'.
I'd be a little more sympathetic to you if you hadn't mistaken me trying to be objective for being a Islamic apologist. I think you present things as an over-simple black/white affair. That's what demagogues and rabble-rousers do. The reality involves a complicated mish-mash of histrory, politics, economics, culture etc.. I will continue to point that out. But if you find anything I have ever posted that is actually supportive of Islam I'd be jolly surprised!
If i want over-simplifed non-analysis I can buy the daily mail. I don't need to read it here.
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@Stephen
I understand Ibn Ishaq was writing about 100 years after Mohamed died and worked from oral stories, not written accounts. Reliable history of the period is hard to get.
The major expansion of the Arabic empire occurred in the generations after Mohammed's death and the koran was compiled by his successors. There are hardly any facts - what we have are 'traditions', essentially legends that are widely believed by Muslims but have very little to back them up.
It cannot be suposed that an empire that grew to extend from Spain to India did so without any violence! The rules of war were rather harsg
h in those days:
"When you march up to attack a city, make its people an offer of peace. If they accept and open their gates, all the people in it shall be subject to forced labor and shall work for you. If they refuse to make peace and they engage you in battle, lay siege to that city. When the Lord your God delivers it into your hand, put to the sword all the men in it. As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves. And you may use the plunder the Lord your God gives you from your enemies. This is how you are to treat all the cities that are at a distance from you and do not belong to the nations nearby.However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes."
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@Stephen
I think the real difference is not Christianity v Islam but between theocracy and secularism. A Christian theocracy would be very like an islamic one, but fortunately for us in the west a full-blown Christian theocracy is almost inconceivable. We see glimpse of what it might e like when we see Christian Fundamentalist attitudes to science and gender issues. It seems to me that religion has 'hardened' over the lst few decades, both in the Christian world and in Islam. As religions are human constructs there is no 'correct' interpretation of them; there are only prevalent interpreations.I don't hate or fear Christianity in the slightest and I haven't been given the slightest no reason to.
In the islamic world the rough equivalent of Christian fundamentalism is Salafism or Wahhabism. Such 'Conservative' interpreatations are heavily promoted by the Saudi regime which has massive wealth to put behind it. But there is no more neccessity for islam to be fundamentalist than there is for Christianity to be fundamentalist - there have to be reasons why Salafism has gained influence in the last few decades.
Whatever the reasons are, it's not because Muslims have suddenly noticed some verses in the koran!
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@Stephen
One reason Christianity is 'nice' is that it was predicated on an imminent new world order in which 'the meek shall inherit the earth'. The original message was that a short period of being oppressed would be followed by a great change and the rich and powerful would be cast down. Jesus taught that it was better to suffer than fight back because - very soon - the 'bosses' would be sent to hell. There was no thought of ever becomung a political force in the mundane world; the first christians saw themselves as an elite-in-waiting, smugly self-satisfied that however much they suffered, they would soon have the last laugh over evil landords, tax-collectors and corrupt priests. Christianity was the religion of the powerless.
Islam was born in very different circumstances - ie in a dynamic and expanding empire. One can ask if the empire served the purpose the religion or if the religion served the purpose of the empire. i think it was originally the latter, but the two became interwined and inseperable.
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@Wrick-It-Ralph
My hunch is that consciousness occurs in complex structures, not in individual particles... I'd like to e ale to prove that by building a conscious computer... but I can't! The failure to invent an 'artificial conscuiousness' is spectacular... computing maybe 'smarter' nowadays, but no one has the faintest idea how to give a robot subjective experience. If monist physicaism is true it should be possible - so why hasn't it been done? I have no idea, but I don't think it's time to give up yet...
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@Wrick-It-Ralph
I find the idea of conscious electrons very unlikely...
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@Wrick-It-Ralph
You believe particles have consciousness?I believe that I'm just a collection of particles that have always existed and had consciousness and that when they break apart they'll form new minds that are nothing like mine except that they used a few of my particle
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@Wrick-It-Ralph
a species or society whose members murdered each other for little or no reason wouldn't be around very long. Therefore something that blocks the behaviour of murdering your neighoour at the drop of a hat will evolve.
In humans that block is implemented via a 'moral sense' - we instinctiely classify behaviours as moral (which are promoted)and immoral (which are supressed). of course we also have conscious thought, so we can see that casual murder would no be good in the long term but we don't need to think about it - we are wired up with an instinct that anti-social stuff like murder and stealing are 'bad'.
in my view, the words morality and immorality refers to an imaginary 'stuff' that suffuses things. When we judge something as moral or immoral we can think we are detecting the presence of morality-stuff or immorality-stuff within it.
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@Stephen
Ok, again nothing "concrete" that would be no evidence, then.
i said 'not much', not 'nothing'.
Being a retired computer programmer i don't claim special expertise in pre-islamic arabian religions! I'm just a random guy on the internet that you take moreseriously than I do myself! I know no more than you can read for yourself on wikipedia etc. AFAICT there is a dearth of contemporary documents, certainly not much I can provide links to.
The policy of the mohamedan empire was certainly to impose islam on their conquests. That follows from the way that religion and politics were - and are - very blurred. The division between church and state is alien to islam!
Force - including lethal force - was employed and non-muslims were subject to restrictions, and were required to pay extra taxes, which undoutedly encouraged many conversions.
My point is that the arahamic religions are the product of human politics and sociology, not the will and whims of deities.
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@Goldtop
Ummm... i have done just that and i wouldn't summarise things in one line the way you did. I don't suppose there'd be a million miles between our views once they are padded out to, say, essay length.
But I'm not going to post an essay on DA - at least not all in one go!
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@Melcharaz
That would require you to read the bible. So, get to readin!
Having done that, let's compare the accounts:
Mark 15:38 The curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. 39 And when the centurion, who stood there in front of Jesus, saw how he died,[c] he said, “Surely this man was the Son of God!”
matt 27:51 At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook, the rocks split 52 and the tombs broke open. The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. 53 They came out of the tombs after Jesus’ resurrection and[e] went into the holy city and appeared to many people.54 When the centurion and those with him who were guarding Jesus saw the earthquake and all that had happened, they were terrified, and exclaimed, “Surely he was the Son of God!”
luke 45 ...for the sun stopped shining. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two. 46 Jesus called out with a loud voice, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.”[e] When he had said this, he breathed his last. 47 The centurion, seeing what had happened, praised God and said, “Surely this was a righteous man"
John has no comparable passage.
It seems Mark's original version (which luke does follow) wasn't dramatic enough for [the author of] Matthew! Quite often matthew inserts stuff to suggest a parallel with OT prophecy, but it looks like on this occasion he indulged in some narrative licence to make it super-clear to his readers that the death of jesus was not thought of as an ordinary event! i suspect he relied that no one could actually check...
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@Goldtop
Old Testament - Hebrews in slavery looking for a deliverer.New Testament - the reign of the Roman Empire.Islam - Tribes of Arabs all killing one another, the rich getting richer off the backs of the poor.
Sort of, but i'd give different one-line summaries from the above. It might not be possible to condense things quite that far - i think my op is already a very broad-brush picture guilty of over-simplifying things! But a forum post is not the place for a 40,000 word thesis - any more than 4 sentences is probably 'tl;dr' and a waste of effort!
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@Stephen
what other religions are you talking about specifically?
As I implied there isn't much concrete stuff to work with, but it is generally accepted that the Arabs - like everyone else - followed unsophisticated animistic, polytheistic religions. Certainly Islam is very 'anti' when it comes to multiple gods; it appears that is not due to conflict with Christianity or hinduism in the first instance (although it came to have the effect of exaggerating the difference) but was aimed at the Arabian polytheists who were the first to be absorbed into the Mohammedan empire.
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@Snoopy
religion and politics as can be observed in this website
old-fshioned racism happens here too.
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@Stephen
Hard evidence is hard to come by! Such things are not documented in policy statements or the minutes of committee meetings. much of the early 'history' of Islam is tradition, often first recorded decades or centuries after the alleged events.
unified under "a common religion". That would be islam? yes or no?
No. Scientology.
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@Stephen
All religions are invented - the only thing to think about is why they were invented.
The historical fact is that Mohammed established a united Arabian empire, and a common religion played a large part in it being unified. i think it plausible that Islam is something of a Frankenstein's monster; having been created as a political tool of secular imperialists it soon became a powerful force in its own right, transforming a political entity into a theocratic one. That transformation has a lot to do with causing the decline in Arab culture, ending a Golden age of philosophy with thinkers such as Averoes and Avicenna replaced with the intellectual stagnation of theologians such as al Ghazali.
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@Melcharaz
"In his right hand are pleasures evermore"
That's what she said....
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@Snoopy
As an atheist I'm loath to discuss this as if it was a reality!
From the beginning of Christianity its teaching was there is an existence after death which can be pleasant or unpleasant, albeit without being over-specific on the details! The pleasant afterlife was conditional, but yet again the scriptures are vague (even contradictory) about what the conditions are!
In relation to the OP, AFAiCT neither scripture nor tradition makes it clear what life in heaven is supposed to be like.
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@Stephen
I get the impression that your heart isn't really as into being anti-Christian as it is when you are being anti-Isamic!
people who want to criticise islam have to face up to the problem that much criticism of islam is motivated by racism and xenophobia - the sort of person who formerly filled the ranks of the NF and BNP are now on the anti-islam wandwagon. Frankly, you frequently come over as an old fashioned racist, just replacing coloured people with muslims.
I don't mean you come over that way to me - it's the way you come over to everyone on DArt and that is why you get accused of being an islamophoe but not a christianophobe. To avoid it, find a different style. Or don't change style and continue to be thought of as a bigoted racist - it's your choice.
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@Snoopy
Heaven, is not considered to be understood as a reward.
isn't it?
"Rejoice and be glad, for your reward in heaven is great; for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
"Be glad in that day and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven For in the same way their fathers used to treat the prophets.
considering the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures of Egypt; for he was looking to the reward.
"Rejoice and be glad, for your reward in heaven is great; for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
etc.
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@secularmerlin
And yet each would deny that the other is a presentation of spiritual truth.
I think that isn't neccessarily so, because intolerance is a consequence of monotheism. In the ancient world it was accepted that each people, tribe or city had its own god. it is only monotheists who claim sole posession of spiritual truth and all else is error and evil.
I think we are used to religions being intolerant because the major western religions derive from judaism which adopted an intolrant form of monotheism in response to the Exile. Before that Hebrews had believed in many gods, YHWH being the one with which they had special relationhip, as the Baylonians had Marduk and the Canaanites had Baal.
The exiled priests of YHWH focused jewish identity on yhwhism and strengthened the distinction between yhwh and the foreign gods, to the point where only yhwh was a god at all - at least as for anyone wanting to be considered a loyal Jew. The first commandment the yhwhist priests placed on the jewish people was "Thou shalt have no other gods before me", enshrining intolerance into the bedrock of judaism, and by extension into the Abrahamic religions derived from it.
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@Stephen
@Melcharaz
Chritianity arose amongt a group of people who were generally poor and had pretty hard lives. The paradise they were promised is not described in any detail, but for such people almost anything would be an improvement!
in Revelation we read:
"Never again will they hunger;
never again will they thirst.
The sun will not beat down on them,
nor any scorching heat.
So Paradise was originally conceived as more about the absence of the hard aspects of the daily life. It is only in more modern times (when ordinary life is not too bad) that mere release from grinding poverty and the endless toil needed just to survive is not enough reward.
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@secularmerlin
Perhaps religions aren't all that different. They are all based on the idea that events in the world are controlled by supernaural beings (ie gods)who can be influenced by performing ritual acts (religious practices). The psychology of Roman Catholicism isn't that much different from that of a cargo cult.It really is thousands of different non-compatible beliefs mostly based on old stories written/told by humans with a limited understanding of science mathematics and medicine.
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in the 6th entury BC the israelite king jehoiaikim refused to pay tribute (ie 'protection money') to the powerful Babylonians which resuted in the Baylonians attacking and defeating the Israelites. Consequently the israelite elite and part of the general poultion were removed from israel to babylon.
The exiled priests were concerned to preserve the ethic identity of the israelites and did so by creating an official mythology, in writing so it was immune from change, dilution or contamination from foreign ideas. It was a scheme that blurred nationalism and relligion, myth and history.
70 years later the babylonians were themselves defeated by the Persians under Cyrus. Cyrus permitted the exiled jews to return to jerusalem, making israel a vassal state of his empire. jewish royalty and aristocracy had been destroyed; the reconstitued Israel was highly theocratic.
For the next few hundred years israel changed hands repeatedly. However it remained a small minor theocracy on the fringes of world event.
By the time of Jesus, israel had passed from Greek control to the Romans, but most Isealites were poor, highly taxed subjects of foreign power. Traditional judaism was represented by a corrupt and venal priesthood and the mass of ordinary people were open to a very different vision.
Christianity has little in common with judaism. Judaism is ethnocentric and is not concerned with aterlife; Christianity is universal and salvation is central.
Christianity was more successful outside israel than with the Jews inside. However this is a period where there were any number of competing creeds and religions around the mediterranean. The dominance of Christianity was due to a historical accident - it was championed by a roman general who went on to become emperor. Almost at a stroke christianity was transformed from 'just another cult' to the official religion of the world's greatest empire.
islam is closely modelled on Judaism. In my view, islam was invented as a political device - it was intended to forge unity aross a pan-arabian empire containing a wide variety of ethnicities and religions.
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@EtrnlVw
it seems to me you believe in a self or soul that exists independently of the brain. i have a different view of what the self is - i compare it to the electric current produced by a dynamo. Such a 'soul' is real - it exists as long as the brain is operating, but only when it is operating.
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@EtrnlVw
but consciousness survives physical death.
I have no doubt you believe that. I do not know how you maintain that belief in the face of the everyday observation that consciousness does not survive anaesthesia, sleep or Alzheimer's.
Such things persuade me that the self is a product of a functioning, intact brain. I can't prove that, but you can't prove 'consciousness survives physical death'. Research, not rhetoric, is how we'll find out who is right.
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@Outplayz
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@disgusted
It's in the Gospel of Matthew (27:52-53) Some people call that a historical record.
However I think it safe to say not everyone considers Matthew reliable and AFAIK there is no other mention of it that does not derive from Matthew.
52 and the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised; 53 and coming out of the graves after His resurrection, they went into the holy city and appeared to many.
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@Outplayz
I think Seth wanted to emphasise that what we perceive has more to do with the brain 'inventing' perceptions than one might suppose. Various experiments show that the perceptions the brain makes up often over-ride our sense data. But of course sense data is not ignored or there'd be no point having sense organs at all.
I'm sure many times you have mistaken one thing or another, at least initially. That would be an instance of 'guessing wrong'. Often more sense data will come in and force a correction of an erroneous perception, but if that didn't happen you might never know you were wrong!
But it's true we are pretty good at guessing right. A glimpse of orange colour that make us guess there is a nice juicy orange in our vicinity is very often vindicated - but it's not always...
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@Outplayz
So, you don't agree that are consciousness is constantly guessing?
Let's clarify the meaning of 'guessing'. In a coin toss i can guess head or tails - I have no reason to choose one and not the other. We can call that a 'pure guess'. On the other hand if you ask me to guess i the sun will rise tomorrow I guess that it will! Call that a 'reasonned guess'
Consciousness evolved so we can make reasoned guesses about the future (which is always uncertain). I'm not suggesting the following is true or even realistic, but it is illustrative of what I have in mind.
Suppose that in the pattern of neural activity corresponding to an object its height above the ground is encoded as the rate a synapse is firing. Further suppose that rate tends to decrease because the synapse tires. That would automatically model the object falling. In that way nature can get the brains model to the world to mimic events in the world.giving it predictive power.
I don't expect you to take that as how I think gravity or things falling is really modelled by the brain - I'm sure things are more complicared than that! It's an over-simplified sketch of the general principle I think play a role in how the brain helps us survive in the world.
So is modelling the probable evolution of conditions in the world 'guessing' - I'd say 'yes, in way' because the future is always unknown - all one can do is 'guess' what the future holds, but it doesn't have to be a pure, aritrary guess. It can be an informed or reasoned guess and it can een be implemented mechanistically, ie without involving actual intelligence (or magical clairvoyance!).
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@Melcharaz
I'd say both TOS and TNG had some excellent episodes and some clunkers. Maybe on average TNG just shades it, but TOS was ground-breaking and gets a lot of credit for that.
I'd guess a newbie watching TOS after TNG would think TOS was clunky - older viewers like me can't help having an attchment to Nichelle Nichols and Grace Lee Witney and their very mini-skirts!
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@secularmerlin
I think of the brain like a computer running a program that models the evolution of a world. We are aware of the contents of that model, not the world 'out there'. If i preceive X I don't know X is 'out there', but I am sure that an X is part of my mental model, and it's perfectly possile for X to e out there without me being aware of it if for any reason X is omitted from the model.
Our senses serve the purpose of adjusting our mental model so it tracks eternal reality; that is sense data steers our perception ut does not drive it. The brain predicts the future, the senses correct the error between prediction and reality.
When we are asleep, sense data correction is less effective with the result that the brain's prdiction of the future can go a bit wild. In a dream a car journey can transform into a boat trip - that is because it is just a minor change in neural activity. When we read some text our brains extract meaning using clues such as meaning and grammar - typos are not noticed because the inkstains we see on the page are secondary - as long as they 'close enough' to what we expect we don't notice them. Sometimes reality is not what we predicted, and then we feel 'surprise'.
Although we do not preceive etenal reality directly, we are still in danger from it. One is not safe from a sabre-toothedtiger or cliff edge by being unaware of it - quite the opposite in fact. Thus we will have evolved to have a fairly accurate mental picture of the real world - otherwise we would have been eaten by critters with better world-modesl! Obviously our world-models arent perfect - we don't need to know about atoms to escape predators - but I think we can hope we arent copletely deceied aout reality either!
Note that perception of X does not mean X is in the world, it means X is part of our mental picture of the world. In particular, that we perceive ourseves as conscious does not guarantee we are consciuous! In my mental picture of the world I am a conscious entity, but I have doubts that is the case! I think consciousness (in the sense of Chamer's hard problem) may be impossile! But consciousness bein impossile does not mean I cannot be represented as a conscious enity within my mental model of the world. My brain doesnt have to implement consciousness - it only has to support the fiction that i am a conscious entity. It is like a faster-than-light space ship - there can be no such thing, but there can be representations of ftl space ships.
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@Fallaneze
It is natural for us to want a comprehensible explanation of the origin of the universe, but I think there isn't one. I don't mean there is no explanation, I mean that the explanation is not compatible with our assumptions about reality. Most of us don't accept something from nothing or actual infinities are possible, but I think it very likely one of our most unchallengeable axioms is wrong. The probem is which one, and what replaces it!
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@Fallaneze
Neither 'something from nothing' nor 'infinite regress' makes sense. I'd say the only thing we know about the origin of the universe is that we don't understand it. My guess is that we are missing some of the pieces and it is my hope that physicists will crack the problem one day, preferably before I'm dead!
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@Wrick-It-Ralph
I think the laws of logic are intended to express how people think naturally. That is to say Aristotle thought that we are wired up with an instinct that a=a and things are either true or false.
Aristotle thought he was making the process of thinking explicit. By using his system of symbols and rules one would reach the same conclusion as one would by thinking. Whether that conclusion matches what happens in reality is something else to worry about.
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