• This is a political forum that is non-biased/non-partisan and treats every person's position on topics equally. This debate forum is not aligned to any political party. In today's politics, many ideas are split between and even within all the political parties. Often we find ourselves agreeing on one platform but some topics break our mold. We are here to discuss them in a civil political debate. If this is your first visit to our political forums, be sure to check out the RULES. Registering for debate politics is necessary before posting. Register today to participate - it's free!

The Science of mind

zyzygy said:
A claim was made that Spirit exists.
Click to expand...

I've made that claim before, but not in this thread, in which I was responding to the claim that the passage in question is meaningless. I'm not sure why questions of existence are relevant to questions of meaning.
 
devildavid said:
How do you distinguish the real from the make believe? I didn't make up all this nonsense about gods/spirits. It was done way before my time, just as many fairy tales were written. Does it really take some deep philosophical analysis to sort the real from the fantasy?
Click to expand...

I think it probably does. Here's a few questions: is the Pythagorean Theorem real, or fantasy? If fantasy, why do we use it successfully to have an effect on things that are apparently real? If it's real, where is it? Is the square root of -1 real, or fantasy? Same follow-up questions as for the Pythagorean Theorem. Is the character Hamlet real, or fantasy? If real, what does that mean? If fantasy, why does he share properties, apparently, with real people (i.e. being male, wanting revenge, loving a woman, etc)? Is the color green real, or fantasy? In what way is it real, if so? If it's fantasy, why does it appear to be a property held by real things?

And so on. The question of what is real, what exists, etc. is pretty deep. The notion that you can just kinda dismiss it by waving your hands and saying the question isn't complicated is pretty strange, if you ask me, given that roughly half of the best and brightest minds ever in the history of the human race have worked on it some, and found it far from easy to answer.
 
ashurbanipal said:
I think it probably does. Here's a few questions: is the Pythagorean Theorem real, or fantasy? If fantasy, why do we use it successfully to have an effect on things that are apparently real? If it's real, where is it? Is the square root of -1 real, or fantasy? Same follow-up questions as for the Pythagorean Theorem. Is the character Hamlet real, or fantasy? If real, what does that mean? If fantasy, why does he share properties, apparently, with real people (i.e. being male, wanting revenge, loving a woman, etc)? Is the color green real, or fantasy? In what way is it real, if so? If it's fantasy, why does it appear to be a property held by real things?

And so on. The question of what is real, what exists, etc. is pretty deep. The notion that you can just kinda dismiss it by waving your hands and saying the question isn't complicated is pretty strange, if you ask me, given that roughly half of the best and brightest minds ever in the history of the human race have worked on it some, and found it far from easy to answer.
Click to expand...

Bad analogies. Fiction is fiction. Fantasy is fantasy. Stories are stories. Using math for practical purposes is not comparable. Math exists as a concept, a tool created by humanity. It was not discovered by man nor does it define reality. Math is not fantasy in the same way that fairy tales are because we define what all our made up stuff is. And it is all made up and does not exist independent of our physical brains.
 
ashurbanipal said:
I've made that claim before, but not in this thread, in which I was responding to the claim that the passage in question is meaningless. I'm not sure why questions of existence are relevant to questions of meaning.
Click to expand...

The passage is meaningless. You can put the words into any order and it makes just as much nonsense.
 
ashurbanipal said:
I think it probably does. Here's a few questions: is the Pythagorean Theorem real, or fantasy? If fantasy, why do we use it successfully to have an effect on things that are apparently real? If it's real, where is it? Is the square root of -1 real, or fantasy? Same follow-up questions as for the Pythagorean Theorem. Is the character Hamlet real, or fantasy? If real, what does that mean? If fantasy, why does he share properties, apparently, with real people (i.e. being male, wanting revenge, loving a woman, etc)? Is the color green real, or fantasy? In what way is it real, if so? If it's fantasy, why does it appear to be a property held by real things?

And so on. The question of what is real, what exists, etc. is pretty deep. The notion that you can just kinda dismiss it by waving your hands and saying the question isn't complicated is pretty strange, if you ask me, given that roughly half of the best and brightest minds ever in the history of the human race have worked on it some, and found it far from easy to answer.
Click to expand...

I'm pretty good at spotting what is real.
 
zyzygy said:
The passage is meaningless. You can put the words into any order and it makes just as much nonsense.
Click to expand...

Well, not any order. But anyway, look here:

You can put the words into any order and it makes just as much nonsense. The passage is meaningless.
Click to expand...

Or, with a little modification, here:

It makes just as much nonsense if you put the words into any order. The passage is meaningless.
Click to expand...

And so on. Is what you said meaningless, just because I can change your words around?
 
zyzygy said:
I'm pretty good at spotting what is real.
Click to expand...

Probably people who are not good at spotting what is real think they are good at spotting what is real.

More to the point, a lot of very bright people probably disagree with your ontology (something that could probably be said of anyone's ontology). That's pretty good reason to doubt your own abilities in this direction. If you've spent a lot of time reading the best literature on all sides of the topic and spent a couple decades grappling with the deep issues involved, that would, conversely, be a reason to have some confidence, albeit confidence tempered by the same humility.

All of that out of the way, once again, what's the point? Whether a sentence refers to something real or not doesn't have anything to do with whether it's meaningful. (In what follows, I'm ignoring any possible distinction between what's real and what's true, just for the sake of brevity). Probably the best way to cash out the meaning of meaning goes something like this: Person P knows what sentence S means just in case P knows at least some of the possible worlds in which S would be true, and sentence S is meaningful if at least one P knows at least some possible worlds in which S is true. So the sentence "The present king of France is bald" is meaningful, even though there is no present king of France. We know in what possible worlds it would be true--namely, those in which there is a present king of France who is bald.

Now there are some quibbles one could have with this basic account. We might say it takes more than one P knowing in which possible worlds S would be true in order for S to be meaningful--perhaps at least 5 people need to know, or perhaps how many need to know changes in different contexts. Also, perhaps P needs to know whether S obtains in the actual world. I'm not sure that meaning needs that as part of its concept, but some philosophers would.

The simplest way I can think of to point out the difference between meaning and truth is this: let's observe that positivist ontology said that only what is possibly observable can be said to exist, and only statements about what can be said to exist, plus the bare minimum abstract syntactical scaffolding, are meaningful. Anything else is gobbledygook. This was the principle by which they wanted to do away with talk about Gods, demons, ghosts, spirit, platonic forms, etc (which is weird, because proponents of those claim they can be possibly observed, but whatever). The idea was that the sentence "God exists" is literally no more meaningful than "The gonfabulatron is mondooding its way through the pargoplasm," or "ahoaijdsf oanosdfh8 oohadsf."

So with that clearly in mind, consider someone who is a good liar. This person can spin a tale with all kinds of fictions, whole sentences referring to nothing at all that can be observed, and yet it's not obvious to everyone that what the liar is spewing forth is gobbledygook. If the liar had said "The gonfabulatron is mondooding its way through the pargoplasm," or "ahoaijdsf oanosdfh8 oohadsf," everyone would have immediately known that the liar was spewing nonsense. So why cannot everyone spot the lie as easily as spotting gobbledygook in the former examples? The answer seems to be that truth and meaning are not coextensive, and a lot of false sentences--sentences that do not refer to anything--are nevertheless meaningful. We would know how to act and think and believe if they were true. We know what would make them true--what conditions would have to obtain for them to be true. Hence, the sentences are meaningful.

It may not be super-easy to figure out what would be the case if there were a single principle of consciousness and self-consciousness pervading all things, but it's not impossible either. Plenty of people have figured it out, and there's (again) a vast literature on the subject, much of it with well-reasoned arguments that are not too difficult to follow. Ergo, the passage is meaningful.
 
Last edited:
devildavid said:
Bad analogies.
Click to expand...

I was answering the general question (that you yourself posed): Does it really take some deep philosophical analysis to sort the real from the fantasy? So there cannot be anything of which the examples are analogous. They're examples designed to show that figuring out what's real and what's not isn't easy.

devildavid said:
Fiction is fiction. Fantasy is fantasy. Stories are stories. Using math for practical purposes is not comparable. Math exists as a concept, a tool created by humanity. It was not discovered by man nor does it define reality. Math is not fantasy in the same way that fairy tales are because we define what all our made up stuff is. And it is all made up and does not exist independent of our physical brains.
Click to expand...

Two points:

1. About half of these hardly answer the questions I posed. Saying "fiction is fiction" doesn't explain why Hamlet shares properties with incontrovertibly real things (namely other human beings).

2. Otherwise you're just making assertions. Why should anyone believe them? Plenty of people don't, and have adduced some convincing arguments to the contrary of your claims. Ceteris Paribus, I'm going to believe a claim for which a convincing argument exists over a claim that is merely asserted with nothing backing it.
 
Last edited:
zyzygy said:
I'm pretty good at spotting what is real.
Click to expand...

I will point out that people who are horrible at spotting what is real think they are pretty good at it.
 
RAMOSS said:
I will point out that people who are horrible at spotting what is real think they are pretty good at it.
Click to expand...

Spotting that the OP was gibberish was easy. "The universal I Am." Who is I? Is he or she related to Will I Am?
 
The universal spirit of the conscious mind is the negation of absolute nothingness
and is the all pervading YOU ARE. It knows nothing outside of the inside of
universal truth and is the light of knowledge. The one reality, the Absolute is the field of absolute consciousness, i.e., that Essence which is out of all relation to conditioned existence. The 'manifested universe', therefore, is pervaded by duality, which is as it were the very essence of its existence as 'manifestation'. But just as the opposite poles of subject and object, spirit and matter, are but aspects of the one unity in which they are synthesized, so, in the manifested universe, there is 'that' which links spirit to matter, subject to object.
 
ashurbanipal said:
I was answering the general question (that you yourself posed): Does it really take some deep philosophical analysis to sort the real from the fantasy? So there cannot be anything of which the examples are analogous. They're examples designed to show that figuring out what's real and what's not isn't easy.



Two points:

1. About half of these hardly answer the questions I posed. Saying "fiction is fiction" doesn't explain why Hamlet shares properties with incontrovertibly real things (namely other human beings).

2. Otherwise you're just making assertions. Why should anyone believe them? Plenty of people don't, and have adduced some convincing arguments to the contrary of your claims. Ceteris Paribus, I'm going to believe a claim for which a convincing argument exists over a claim that is merely asserted with nothing backing it.
Click to expand...

Antone who claims there is spirit or god is making assertions. I just point out how easy it is to make assertions about things that are completely make believe. Your version of spirits/god is far different than the next person and the next person, etc. The reason? You guessed it. Anyone can make up things about which there is no verifiable information. You saw/felt a spirit? Good for you. Can you share that exact experience with anyone? Can you give us directions on how to achieve the same feeling/experience? No, you can't. It's all in your imagination. And I can choose to imagine spirits or not. Unlike physical reality, which we all experience one way or another without choice. You don't want to eat or drink? See what happens to you. You don't want to imagine spirits? Whole different thing, because it has no impact on you except for the ideas you hold in your brain.
 
zyzygy said:
The universal spirit of the conscious mind is the negation of absolute nothingness
and is the all pervading YOU ARE. It knows nothing outside of the inside of
universal truth and is the light of knowledge. The one reality, the Absolute is the field of absolute consciousness, i.e., that Essence which is out of all relation to conditioned existence. The 'manifested universe', therefore, is pervaded by duality, which is as it were the very essence of its existence as 'manifestation'. But just as the opposite poles of subject and object, spirit and matter, are but aspects of the one unity in which they are synthesized, so, in the manifested universe, there is 'that' which links spirit to matter, subject to object.
Click to expand...

This is so deep that it must be real. I'm sure you are not just making things up because of the special words you used. I embrace this in my soul.
 
devildavid said:
This is so deep that it must be real. I'm sure you are not just making things up because of the special words you used. I embrace this in my soul.
Click to expand...

You have been touched by the Universal One.
 
devildavid said:
Antone who claims there is spirit or god is making assertions. I just point out how easy it is to make assertions about things that are completely make believe. Your version of spirits/god is far different than the next person and the next person, etc. The reason? You guessed it. Anyone can make up things about which there is no verifiable information. You saw/felt a spirit? Good for you. Can you share that exact experience with anyone? Can you give us directions on how to achieve the same feeling/experience? No, you can't. It's all in your imagination. And I can choose to imagine spirits or not. Unlike physical reality, which we all experience one way or another without choice. You don't want to eat or drink? See what happens to you. You don't want to imagine spirits? Whole different thing, because it has no impact on you except for the ideas you hold in your brain.
Click to expand...

So, why is any of that relevant to the topic at hand?
 
ashurbanipal said:
So, why is any of that relevant to the topic at hand?
Click to expand...

Because it directly calls into question any basis for the topic at hand.Whenever the topic is something imaginary it is legitimate to point this out.
 
"We treat of Spirit as the Active and the only Self-Conscious Principle."
No evidence of the existence of this Spirit was presented. And all humans are self conscious. And why the unnecessary capital letters? The size of the letters do not matter, it is still gobbledygook.
 
Last edited:
https://exemplore.com/misc/The-Rise-of-Spirit-Science

There is good quiz there where you have to guess if a quote is fake or comes from a Spirit Science article.

"Our consciousness, the planets, the stars and countless galaxies are entangled. The Universe is one with the Source."

Real or fake?

"Remember, just as you are creating your own individual reality, we are all cocreating our realities as a collective."

Real or fake?
 
Last edited:
zyzygy said:
Are you being serious? It is blindingly obvious.
Click to expand...

Yes, I'm being quite serious. If it's blindingly obvious, you should have no trouble articulating the relevance.
 
devildavid said:
Because it directly calls into question any basis for the topic at hand.Whenever the topic is something imaginary it is legitimate to point this out.
Click to expand...

How does that work, exactly? Imaginary things can still be meaningful. You and zyzygy seem to have trouble separating the two (i.e. truth and meaning) in your thinking. I was responding to the claim that the passage in question is not meaningful. I've already said I think it's probably false--as in, not true, so you guys trying to debate me on that topic is a little absurd, unless you're claiming the passage is true.
 
ashurbanipal said:
How does that work, exactly? Imaginary things can still be meaningful. You and zyzygy seem to have trouble separating the two (i.e. truth and meaning) in your thinking. I was responding to the claim that the passage in question is not meaningful. I've already said I think it's probably false--as in, not true, so you guys trying to debate me on that topic is a little absurd, unless you're claiming the passage is true.
Click to expand...

I am well aware of the definitions of the words truth and meaning. The passage is neither true or false. It is nonsense. Anyone with a reasonable vocabulary can concoct that kind of gibberish.
 
zyzygy said:
We did.
Click to expand...

Then you misunderstand something--wherever you think you showed the relevance, what is the relevance of that? So far, as far as I can tell, you've merely asserted that the falseness of the passage implies that it is also meaningless. I've posted an argument to the contrary, which has gone unanswered.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom