sudly said:

You've suggested there's a 'bigger mind' that goes beyond the laws of nature. Those laws of nature haven't changed so there's no reason to think they're unbound, until gravity changes, so if that ever happens then sure the laws of nature may not be bound but that hasn't happened yet.

If the laws of nature just are then it doesn't matter what they are bound by because they just are.

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We're talking about this 'bigger mind' idea of yours, and what you call a 'bigger mind', I call the idea of god, if you can describe the difference that'd be nice because so far you've just said it's beyond the laws of nature. 

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Peyote Road said: Idealism on the other hand, is the position that all objects of knowledge are in some way dependent on the activity of mind. Living or non living everything we experience  is as a manifestation of what could be called Bigger Mind.

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As for certain beings being responsible for the corruption of this world, or sin as you may call it.

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"I hit myself in the foot with a shovel for your mortgage"

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You do realize that is comedy, right? I mean is there a point you're trying to make?

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My point was that if I believed, I'd believe in an unjust creator.

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Like a gnostic demiurge then. It's quite possible that's the case, but at the same time I think we need to be careful making judgments about ultimate justice in life from our limited perspective.

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I feel I have responsibilities and a duty to make something sustainable of my lifestyle and I'm not a fan of the debt pushed on us by capitalism but I don't feel as though there's something beyond mankind that induced it.

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My question was, why do you feel free in this world when so much of it is controlled by greedy dishonest people who use every means available to them to further their own gain and deceive as many people as they can? Are you aware of how often politicians lie to the public? Do you realize how much of human thought is  controlled by mainstream media and how psychological techniques are employed to shape public opinion? And what about how much of our behavior is controlled by past conditioning and habitual patterns? 

As far as something "beyond mankind" I am trying to point to the psychological forces at play. Take an idea for example. An idea can unite and mobilize thousands of people to work together to accomplish major changes in the physical world. In that sense, an idea can take on a life of its own and be just as real as a physical object in terms of the effect it can produce. So t I think we can consider the question of why the world is the way it is and see that the power to influence the minds of many people is a very great power.

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I have considered it and thought about it and realised it's a silly idea because I don't ignore my senses. In your example of a tree there is my mind that can consciously process the environmental information associated with a tree, as in my eyes can receive the photons of light reflected off the tree and process them into an image of that tree. I can also walk up to the tree and use my senses of touch to feel the structure of the tree, or to pull off a leaf or a piece of bark.

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But those are all just sensory experiences. You can also dream about a tree, walk up to it and pull off a leaf as well. We're just used to believing in a physical world out there but it actually makes more sense to talk about shared perceptions.

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The idea of there being only a mind comes about in my view through a failure to understand the nature of vision and the perception of the environment through our senses.

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That's may be because you're imagining mind to be something that only exists inside your head. I'm saying, what can you experience that is not an aspect of mind? That's why I use the term Bigger Mind.

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The perception of a tree is an aspect of mind but the tree itself it not and you'd have to be as thick as a tree to think otherwise, that or simply scared of a material world and the knowledge that our bodies and experiences of being an embodied being are infact mortal in their existence, as in not infinite or beyond the laws of nature.

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Truthfully we cannot say anything about a "tree itself" apart from our perception of it. That's the whole point. I don't think this has anything to do with fear of the material world or embodied existence. Believing they are a real person in a real physical world is actually what gives most people comfort because the idea of it all being a play of consciousness fills them with uncertainty and existential loneliness. It doesn't provide any guarantee of immortality either.

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What proof is there of only mind existing or mind alone having any impact on the material world? EEG readers may be the closest to that but even then they would only show that activity of the mind is within the body.

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What proof is there of anything besides mind existing? That's the point. We know consciousness exists, because we experience it. But no one has ever experienced anything outside of consciousness. Certainly consciousness can appear to take on form, what you call a physical world, but that only tells us about the nature of consciousness. It tells us absolutely nothing about whether an actual physical world exists. To posit a physical world existing independently, is already to posit something extra which we have no way to verify. When you play a video game your video game character can encounter trees, shrubs, rocks, etc but it doesn't mean there is actual world generating those perceptions, they can be generation from information stored on a disc. How do we know that what we call the physical world isn't just generated from information also?

Look at consciousness like a stage. On this stage appears sensations and perceptions. That's all that ever happens. Look at your current experience. Is that not what is going on right now? Hasn't it always been that way? So, what makes you think there's anything else?

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The material creates consciousness, as somehow it has evolved (otherwise we're denying evolution), and consciousness can enact will upon the world through action but that will alone does not because that would be telekinesis. 

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Peyote Road said: I guess it depends on your definition of God. The Bigger Mind concept is compatible with pantheism and panentheism, of which all concepts of God are not.

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pantheism
1. a doctrine which identifies God with the universe, or regards the universe as a manifestation of God.
2. the worship or tolerance of many gods.

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panentheism:
the belief or doctrine that God is greater than the universe and includes and interpenetrates it.

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Peyote Road said: In mainstream Christianity you have the idea that certain spiritual beings are responsible for the corruption of this world. You find ideas like this all across the world in the spiritual systems. The basic belief in common is that the conditions of this world are a result of the actions of various spiritual intelligences.

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Peyote Road said: Believing they are a real person in a real physical world is actually what gives most people comfort because the idea of it all being a play of consciousness fills them with uncertainty and existential loneliness.

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We don't just experience our bodies as objects from the outside, we also experience them from within, we all experience a sense of being a body from the inside. Sensory signals coming from inside the body are continually telling the brain about the state of the internal organs, how the heart is doing, what the blood pressure is like. lots of things, and this kind of perception that we call interception is rather overlooked but critically important because perception and regulation of the internal state of the body is what keeps us alive.

Experiences of having a body are deeply grounded in perceiving our bodies from within. Experiences of the inside are different from experiences of the body and the world outside.

Perception of the internal state of the body isn't about figuring out what's there it's about control and regulation, keeping the physiological variables within the tight bounds of the compactable with survival.

When the brain uses predictions to figure out what is there we perceive objects as the causes of sensations. but when the brain uses predictions to control or regulate things we experience how well or bad that experience is going, so our most basic experiences of being a self or being an embodied organism are deeply engrounded in the biological mechanisms that keep us alive.

We experience the world and ourselves with, through and because of our living bodies.

- Anil Seth

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“Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” Consequently, if you believe that there are organisms on this planet, such as human beings, that possess characteristics which evolution is unable to account for, then you cannot call yourself an evolutionist, and you certainly cannot call yourself a bona fide Darwinist.

Human beings are animals. One feature which characterizes human beings is consciousness. (It may characterize some other animals as well.) Consequently, if you believe that consciousness cannot be explained in materialistic terms, then you cannot call yourself a consistent Darwinian evolutionist

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redgreenvines said:

some stuff is so backwards here.

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I see nature on Earth as alive and fertile and intelligent and occurring through chance, I also think life is rare in the cosmos and that we are lucky to have it here on Earth.

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Was this not some sort of reference to some sort of original sin? I was merely pointing out the silliness behind the idea that Jesus can forgive a sin through his death, hence the equivalence of "I hit myself in the foot with a shovel for your mortgage".

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And yes I'm rather aware of the political scenario we find ourselves in where ambiguity is the go to move for so many politicians as they funnel money to the rich and powerful. To answer more directly I feel free because I don't believe I have a predetermined fate set by some deity,

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I think my mind exists not only in my head but within my chest and bowels too.
Kissing someone else isn't an aspect of my mind though the memory of it may be. I can enjoy the action itself and the experience and the memory I make but those lips I kiss certainly aren't solely an aspect of my own mind, I would think they belong to another mind.

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A tree is compromised largely of lignin and it has a different cellular structure to that of animals, plus the leaves have chlorophyll to go through the processes of photosynthesis so there is something to say about what a tree is, what it does and what is within it. You know the kind of stuff they teach in biology classes..

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Everything outside of the human nervous system is proof of things existing outside of the mind.

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We don't experience things outside of our own consciousness but we do experience what is outside of our bodies through our consciousness that consciously processes information from the environment around us.

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I wouldn't posit a physical world existing independently of mind, but a mind existing dependently within a physical world.

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My view is one of implicit perceptions and explicit sensations. A dualistic view that does NOT encompass a disembodied mind, but one that united the two within the human being as an embodied organism with a mind.

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P.S. The HPA Axis and the fight or flight response are how the brain interacts with the bowels that interact with the heart to influence heart rate and blood pressure to make up the mind all the while interacting with the physical world through our anatomy.

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Consciousness did evolve, the question still remains exactly of how but to deny that it did evolve it to deny the theory of evolution.

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“Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” Consequently, if you believe that there are organisms on this planet, such as human beings, that possess characteristics which evolution is unable to account for, then you cannot call yourself an evolutionist, and you certainly cannot call yourself a bona fide Darwinist.

Human beings are animals. One feature which characterizes human beings is consciousness. (It may characterize some other animals as well.) Consequently, if you believe that consciousness cannot be explained in materialistic terms, then you cannot call yourself a consistent Darwinian evolutionist

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hTx said:

so if your saying consciousness evolved, and that all life has consciousness, are you saying that DNA was the result of evolution?

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It now seems certain that RNA was the first molecule of heredity, so it evolved all the essential methods for storing and expressing genetic information before DNA came onto the scene. However, single-stranded RNA is rather unstable and is easily damaged by enzymes.

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We are reasonably sure now that DNA and DNA replication mechanisms appeared late in early life history, and that DNA originated from RNA in an RNA/protein world. The origin and evolution of DNA replication mechanisms thus occurred at a critical period of life evolution that encompasses the late RNA world and the emergence of the Last Universal Cellular Ancestor (LUCA) to the present three domains of life (Eukarya, Bacteria and Archaea.).

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Peyote Road said: Yes but the body also is only made of perception and sensation. Mind. It's part of the play, so you can't use it as a reference point.

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hTx said:

So ...what your saying is that matter and all the random interactions with itself since the big bang,
eventually, randomly, and non-purposefully spawned an arrangement of matter which  uniquely trends towards complexity... a direct rebellion to the second law of thermodynamics?

Life, consciousness, knowledge, technology...all exponentially increase the universes complexity.

the second law of thermodynamics tells us that the complexity of the universe is decreasing exponentially.

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viktor said:

There used to be great materialist vs. idealist debates on here, but the champions of the materialist side (OC, Icelander, Ped) have all gone.

Did the materialists lose?

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CosmicJoke said:

Petty battle, IMHO.... The real scientific materialists are busy working on their science, they don't have time for message boards.  It's really only the people who make scientific materialism the new inquisition that I have a problem with, yanno the people who had Reich imprisoned and his books burned, or specifically tried to shut down Sheldrake's work....  Not all that different than faith based fundies.

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CosmicJoke said:

viktor said:

There used to be great materialist vs. idealist debates on here, but the champions of the materialist side (OC, Icelander, Ped) have all gone.

Did the materialists lose?

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Petty battle, IMHO.... The real scientific materialists are busy working on their science, they don't have time for message boards.  It's really only the people who make scientific materialism the new inquisition that I have a problem with, yanno the people who had Reich imprisoned and his books burned, or specifically tried to shut down Sheldrake's work....  Not all that different than faith based fundies.

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