John Dub

I’ve had the same discussion with several people, some of them intelligent liberals, but I’ll challenge them on vaccines or GMOs or 9/11 or whatever and they’ll start with the denial of my facts. I’ll stop and review how I know what I know and I’ll ask them if they agree. We can walk through the methods and they’ll be fine. Then, we go back to…[Read more]

Now that science explains it better (and is getting even better every day), we have two options, science and religion. If the religion option went away, no one would choose it and science would win the day.

I see no evidence for that, but I do see evidence against it. That religions like Raelism have been created or that paganism has come back. I…[Read more]

Yeah, I don’t know where I got that 25 feet number. It was a link on this forum somewhere. Maybe it was 25 centimeters.

Yeah π, and they vote.  — CC

Lausten: Evolution’s almost too simple to understand. — This was actually π but I didn’t properly attribute it to him, see pg 1

Change over time, guided by environmental conditions.    –CC

I posted this on facebook today.

We are living in a farce once again. What should be art is politics. Dostoyevsky made this the theme of the Brothers Karamazov and a modern writer made it a little more digestible in a book about a family in the 60’s. It’s a great book that is very relevant to today. It warns of what happens when leadership doe…[Read more]

Here’s me asking Dan Barker about it. His talk was on Biblical interpretation that he studied, and once preached and how it’s actually dumb and he made fun it. It was very entertaining, but for me, useless. 

His answer is, that it’s supposed to be God’s word, so we shouldn’t need to understand the historical context. But when did it become God’s…[Read more]

He says, “How do we define what true Islam or true any religion is? Do we interpret the Koran ourselves, proclaim the interpretation to define Islam and then say any idea outside of that isn’t Islamic? No, that’s how those who think scripture is divinely inspired define Islam.”

I’ve been trying to say that for years, to the people who are doi…[Read more]

Also, the trend of the 2100 sea level rise has been on a trend downward for years now. A decade ago, it was more than 20 feet.

Never have I seen this shown in any chart or study anywhere. I have only heard reports of isolated statements , often not peer reviewed, that don’t indicate any kind of trend, they only show that isolated statements don’t…[Read more]

To a lay person, that networked pattern of neurons firing would probably look similar to when I was imagining something else, let’s say a duck.

I know this is changing rapidly, but last time I checked, we can only see general areas of the brain lighting up. We can’t map out an image by looking at neurons firing. Lay person or otherwise. C…[Read more]

Sean Carrol is awesome. I would not dare to try to add anything to what he says.

The mind is the internal holographic representation of perceived internal and external data. Thoughts can extend beyond the confinement of the brain, but all thought is truly imaginary, a brain’s best guess of what data the senses are transmitting and fashioning an “internal picture” of the sensory input.

That’s a good picture of how I think about…[Read more]

Have nations not been submerged by the oceans? Just on the face of these reports and the statements of what we should expect by 2012 on this website alone all the snow and ice on earth should have been melted by now.

How do you do that? How do you ask the very questions that you can’t answer? I’m not going to chase you down on this, because it…[Read more]

For me, the universe is the right place to start because it’s the incubator for everything else. Without the billions of years of cooking up elements and forming ecosystems, there would be no mind. So you need that big picture to know what a mind is. But, since those minds didn’t come to consciousness until all of that already happened, and wer…[Read more]

Hasn’t that been done?

I agree with your definition, but it needs to be clarified in this thread.

 It is only through science that our mind can get a sense of being produced by the brain.

Exactly.

Hasn’t it been show that our brain neurons extend far beyond the mind

Exactly again.

What’s in the nutshell?

Starting with “Whereas…”

Lausten, When you said “…I don’t like that the mind is not aware of it being a result of activity in the brain…”, I don’t understand what you mean.  What were you referencing by “it“. — TimB

To answer that, I’d need to answer just what self-awareness is and I don’t think anyone has that answer. When I say “aware”, what do you think I’m talking ab…[Read more]

TimB, that is a valid alternative to the problem. I was considering in the back of my, um, mind, but I can’t quite get on board with it. I don’t like that the mind is not aware of it being a result of activity in the brain. It feels like thoughts are swirling around my head somewhere and that some of them come from other parts of my body or just…[Read more]

Player has been blocked. I don’t think much more explanation is warranted but I’ll consider any feedback. The decision is not something we take lightly. We like to keep things lively but there are limits.

The above links to a longer discussion, which I haven’t worked through and probably won’t get entirely. 

But, I noticed it is proving that immaterial minds don’t exist. That’s a fine distinction. There is no such thing as a mind without a physical brain, so in that sense, “everything is physical”, but that’s different than saying the mind is the…[Read more]

I’m in a facebook group called “Real Atheology” they do super technical logic stuff about theology, but the “A” is against, just like a-theist. Here’s how they put it just recently:

The Mind-Body Problem

(1) The body is a physical entity.
(2) The mind is a non-physical entity.
(3) The mind and the body causally interact.
(4) Physical entities and…

[Read more]

Evolution’s almost too simple to understand.

I recently heard someone’s deconversion story on a podcast. They said, when you strip away all the complex chemistry we now know, the idea of evolution is pretty simple. This is basically what you find in Darwin’s work.