Consciousness..Mind from matter or mind controlling matter?

actually i think "calling things what they are" is a habit that makes religion as dangerous as it is.

it's fine for you- honestly, call it whatever you like. the problem with calling things "what they are" from a religious standpoint is there's actually quite a lot of metaphor and symbolism involved.

if you were to describe everything in life like you would in an autopsy, you'd be ill-equipped to grasp a good portion of classic poetry, similarly to the way people argue and fight over the "literal" meaning of scripture when there might not even be one. if everyone is open to the possibility that there might not be one right meaning- or the awarebess that we might not know what it is, you can't lord the one (exclusive) true meaning over everyone else.

by entering into the symbolism, you're much better equipped (if "well" equipped is possible or not) to learn from the person who was writing. if you insist that eve's a rib and "7 days" is 168 hours, you're just not reading it.

however, because i do take interest in symbolism, when william shakespeare says "tis the east, and juliet is the sun" i have a pretty good idea where the line came from, thus i have some guess what he's saying. (although it's still debatable.)

without the symbols, the reading is pretty empty. imaging reading a book on brain surgery with no glossary, it would be no better. plus, in religious texts, one word can mean several things that are quite different in nature.

the only logical reason to call them something else would be if it offended your sensibility to do so. if there's no god, no one cares what you call it, whereas i think renaming and preventing comprehension in the first place is a very good reason to avoid it.

tinygiraffe, thanks for an intelligent post. I agree that when religious scriptures are taken literally, when we fail to appreciate their metaphorical messages we end up with absurdities.

As I usually conceive it, "spirit" has nothing to do with either of the other three "s-words": soul, superstition, and supernaturalism.
To me it best refers to the tone, mood, energy, character, etc. of something, i.e., the geist of an era, the animus of an action. Sometimes I find my efforts in music and painting to be "spirited" and at other times they lack spirit. I might even say--so long as we take it metaphorically--they are soulful or souless. But never can their source, their duende, be considered supernatural.

It may be a product of conscious thought, but I can't see why this is a problem. A paper about the bone structure of the human hand would not be rendered meaningless or invalid just because it was written by a human hand.

JLN & tinygiraffe,

I'm quite skeptical about the view that the Bible is largely metaphorical (I don't know much about other religious texts). What makes you think so? I suspect that it might be mostly literal. Liberal Christians are good people, but bad Christians. Fundamentalists are good Christians, but unfortunately for all of us, Christianity is a pile of s--t to begin with.

Its a problem because it is an example of the "chicken and egg" question.
Your "bone structure" scenario fails to reflect this.

we can find the answer to that by simply investigating the brain enough, just as we have always done with everything in science. go be a neurobiologist if you aren't already.

the method is simple: analyze the algorithms by which the brain processes data. if the physical operation of the brain, once it is fully understood, is not enough to account for mind, then there is somethiing more. if it is enough, then there is not...

i am not attempting to discount the effectiveness of philosophy! science arose from it!

i dunno about "bad," liberal christians remind me of jesus- farther from perfect than some might think, but basically trying to live in a way that would enable them to commune with god.

fundamentalist christians remind me of paul. paul doesn't remind me of jesus or any other noble figure.

Agrote, I suppose that much of the world's "scriptures"--its cultures' origin myths and ideological fantasies--reflect both the relative IGNORANCE of ancient societies (compared to the explanations eventually achieved by modern science) and the WISDOM of their sages.

Humanity's wisdom has, in this sense, preceded its knowledge. I can easily see that my theoretical knowledge of the physical world surpasses that of most "primitives" but when it comes to social values and theories of justice and the meaning of life I enjoy no solid advantages over them.
To me the literal dimensions of their "scriptures" reflect their ignorance and their metaphorically expressed insights reflect their wisdom.
If you prefer to read their scriptures only at the literal level and ignore the wisdom obtained from hermeneutical struggle with their symbolic/metaphorical creations, that's your loss.

OOOH, that's very well said... i've never even thought of it that way.

I didn't say it was wholly literal. But fundamentalists seem to be criticised for taking certain things literally which really can't be taken any other way. E.g. as far as I know, the Bible does actually tell us not to have gay sex. And (I think) the Koran actually tells muslims to either convert or kill the nonbelievers. How can these things be interpreted metaphorically?

i take the "gay sex" (man with another man) thing metaphorically. in fact, the 613 mitzvot (commandments) all had metaphorical links to the parts of the body.

the law prescribes that a man laying with another man shall be put to death.

as far as i know, the keepers of this law never followed it literally, that should tell you a lot right there.

can't comment on the koran, when it comes to islam i have very little experience with the material.

Agrote, regarding the following: " the Bible does actually tell us not to have gay sex. And (I think) the Koran actually tells muslims to either convert or kill the nonbelievers. How can these things be interpreted metaphorically?" I agree. But those injunctions are reflections of the ignorance of those eras. They seem to lack any indication of wisdom, at least from my interpretive perspective.

TG. As far as I can tell, Paul was in no way a Christian in Jesus' sense. Paul may have created "Christianity" as we know it, but that has turned out to be a very unchristian institution if you ask me. Paul's emphasis on FAITh as opposed to GOOD DEEDS and LOVE, reflect his own inability to be a good and loving person.

catholics may think i take issue with catholicism- no more than with chrisitanity itself. but i do think paul was an atrocity.

and as far as i'm concerened, catholics are christians- that debate bothers me about as much as it does them. but i don't think paul was much of one. it's always nice to meet someone who agrees on this, usually i get a lot of funny looks about it.

TG, the strongest critique of Paul is Nietzsche's work, The Anti-Christ.

followed by the strongest critique of nietzsche's work: "no, you are!"

What critique:?:

When I speak off topic I am not saddened by being ignored, but when I speak on-topic and every single post following is off-topic, it is truly disappointing!

topics are pretty unstable things. be glad you're at a2k, which has some of the most stable threads i've ever seen in over a decade of internet use. as it happens, we were really talking about two different things in duplex by the time you posted.

Being a materialist (roughly), I have to say that consciousness is merely the accessing of memory. It is situated in the brain.

Let me explain something that will help you understand this:
Pain. We feel it in a place on our body, but really, pain is a sensation created at a specific location in the mind, and it is presented to us as if it were "happening" in a place on our body.

Amazing to think all sensations are being felt in the brain, and are assigned to physical locations. Even if we felt something in (physically) our brain, the sensation we feel does not actually exist as a physical thing, but is merely a bunch of neural connections firing up.

Anyhow, it is the same with consciousness. It is simply a sensation in the brain, and it is assigned to our head.

i'm familiar with the illustration that if you hurt your arm, it tells your brain, that while you think feel it in your arm, this is nonetheless happening in the brain. this is pretty basic physiology. it makes perfect sense. i'm not rejecting that.

i agree that the access point of memory is the brain. an eeg will show which part of the brain is working when certain memory is accessed, i'm not rejecting that either. science would also say that the memory itself being accessed is also in the brain, and here, science has a very good bet. it's not being unfamiliar with the idea that makes me wonder about alternatives, however.