Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion Not-Quite-Science Forum Philosophy of Religions--all religions, including,

???

No one is trying to eradicate your choice to be wrong...but regardless, you still are wrong.



Hardly; it points to no degree awareness beyond that of a key fitting into a lock. The molecular mechanisms, changes in protein conformation, signalling cascades, etc, that comprise the passage of these signals are well elucidated - no cognition present; just atoms and molecules behaving as physical laws dictates.


Why does there have to be something "behind" that. To quote Tim Minchin:
Isn't this enough? // Just this world?
Just this beautiful, complex
Wonderfully unfathomable, NATURAL world?
How does it so fail to hold our attention
That we have to diminish it with the invention
Of cheap, man-made Myths and Monsters?


Again, no one is trying to deny you anything. You're free to pretend myths and "spirituality" provide insight into the universe. However, I too remain free to illistrate just how poorly those beliefs hold up against factual reality.


Anyone who thinks science is purely a reductionist process is completely ignorant of science. We rely on methodological reductionism to understand basic processes, but hierarchical reductionism and holism are key parts of formulating theories from sets of facts. Indeed, understanding emergent processes would be impossible using a purely reductionist approach. Reductionism is simple a tool - one of many that we use.


Again with the randomness! The only person here who thinks biology, physics, etc, are random processes are you. This is, as has been described already, completely and totally wrong.

What you are engaged in is a logical fallacy termed an argument from fallacy - you are predicating your argument on a flasehood. I.E. you are lying about science to try and disprove it.

That is quite dishonest.


I fail to see how a natural trend towards diversification equals being drawn to a source. Indeed, if evolution were drawing us to a source we should see patterns of evolution in which life becomes more similar - rather than more different.


Why would you bring up an irrelevant quantum mechanics theory in response to a post about the biological and neurological processes underlying conciousness?

And while I snipped for brevity, the Copenhagen Interpretation of QED remains the most accepted interpretation of QM among physicists today...so your little story is again, based on a fallacy.


If you can find an exception to the basic "laws" of science - relativity, QM, conservation of momentum, entropy, etc, you'd be renound in scientific circles. Since you, nor anyone else, is famous for those reasons one can only assume that the above statement - like so many you've made in this post - is based on another fallacy.


Only in your mind. Indeed, QM explicitly states the opposite - and sets strict spatial limits over which particles interact; i.e. the distance over which they can be connected. Aside from entangled particles, these distances are very, very small.


Again, this is false. Bells theorem makes no such claim - to the contrary, his theorem deals with a small subset of particles - those which are entwined. And, as with most of QM, it is unclear how these relate to the macro world - QM is not explanatory above the subbatomic...so basing anything about our biology on it is dubious at best.


And you just gave up all illusions of credibility. The mechanisms by which state-of-mind impact health are well established; stress hormones impair immune & tissue repair mechanisms through well-described and understood mechanisms. Meditation is, at best, weak at affecting these HPA-axis derived responses.

Biological processes are not subject to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, as they occur in objects large than those which experience quantum phenomena (generally, sub-atomic particles). The maacromolicules which our bodies are comprise of behave as per classical newtonian physics dictates, for the simple reason that they are incapable of achieving a coherent quantum state, and thus do not act in a fashion consistent with QM.


No, this leads to one conclusion - you've watched too much deepak chopra and have mistaken his ramblings for real science.


More nonsensical nonsense. You've a) not demonstrated anything of the sort, and b) falsely assigned randomness to scientific observations which are distinctly non-random.

Its your excuse to not learn what the science actually says - if its inconvenient to your belief system, you declare it 'random' and pretend it doesn't exist.


No, I mean stochastic. Why is it you cannot support your position without completely mis-representing science and without redefining the english language?



Hardly. Evolution has led to traits which we interpret as 'morlaity'; its in our genes - ergo, it comes from within. It is not something imparted on us by an external supernatural force.


Its not a belief - its an observed reality - as your friend observed. Every cell in your body doesn't magically stop working the moment your brain fails - so long as they have food & oxygen, they will continue on in their evolutionarily-programmed behaviours.


I never stated anything that could possibly have been interpreted to mean the above. Your brain is your source of conciousness - if the brain dies so does the conciousness. But the concious is just one layer of our biology, and it a part of biology most life on earth gets along without just fine.


You'd be surprized just how predictable human behaviour is. Indeed, fMRI has shown us that your brain makes decisions before your concious mind is aware of it, leading some neurologists to question whether "free will" and conciousness even exist.


We simply are. Good and bad are human concepts that lack any sort of existence in the real world.

Bryan