Ha! I never said I believed in any such thing, I am agnostic about the problem. I am happy to admit I simply do not know, I understand that currently the problem is unfalsifiable.....however, the objective test was your idea, the position that the mind and brain are interdependent is your position and therefore it is up to you to illustrate the definitive claims you have made.
Description of Afterlife?
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Ha! I never said I believed in any such thing, I am agnostic about the problem. I am happy to admit I simply do not know, I understand that currently the problem is unfalsifiable.....however, the objective test was your idea, the position that the mind and brain are interdependent is your position and therefore it is up to you to illustrate the definitive claims you have made.
I think your need to believe in an afterlife comes more from your natural survival instincts. If you were looking at it subjectively you would see that there's as much reason to be open minded about tooth fairies, Unicorns or Yahweh as there is about life after death.
By the logic that you used earlier regarding perception, the fact that you can see it, and therefore your senses are telling you it is there, then that precludes its invisibility for a start, but it also proves that it exists....at least if we assume you were correct earlier with regard to your statements about the reality of what your senses tell you..... (which I do not)
By the logic that you used earlier regarding perception, the fact that you can see it, and therefore your senses are telling you it is there, then that precludes its invisibility for a start, but it also proves that it exists....at least if we assume you were correct earlier with regard to your statements about the reality of what your senses tell you..... (which I do not)
Unless I realize that its a Hallucination. Also if it cant be physically tested for, then I know its not real, just like I understand that other peoples hallucinations about God / Gods are not real.
True story - a girl I knew told me she knows God is real because she has seen and talked to him in her sleep ..... Ok ...... *just back away slowly, hope she doesnt follow, run for the hills and delete her number.*
Its also obvious from your post here that the only reason you seem to post in these threads is to antagonize other people.
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If all anyone reported was something like a drug induced hallucination i would say sure it's almost certainly the brain dying but because people report stuff like floating around and seeing the real world in quite some detail im less certain it's all in the brain.
Take sleep paralysis and out of body experiences that go along with them, if all that happened was the sleep paralysis and a feeling of losing awareness or even the energy vibrations alone and a lucid dream i would accept its all in the brain, however when people keep reporting stuff like floating above their body after exit (why not go straight into a dream?) and stuff like an energy cord, a pounding heart (said to be a chakra) plus other energetic effects, struggles to go near power cables or pass through objects, hows is that explained?
And yet people report out of body experiences in plain old dreams all the time.
This one time in my sleep I became the Phoenix Force and soared through the Universe destroying all evil. Therefore this incident must have been real.
I look at problems objectively wherever possible, and the objective position is one of agnosticism, tooth fairies can be objectively explained to a great degree for example, so can unicorns as being myths, namely due to linguistic and cultural changes in such mythologies and the societies in which they originated (Pliny's definition of a Unicorn for example). The broader question of existence is however somewhat more elusive and far more open to speculation and interpretation, one mans heaven is another man hell for example....
Yahweh is again more complex than simply a unicorn, as it refers to a concept rather than a demonstrable observable definition, so it is more a matter of interpretation of a concept rather than one of specificity.
I would argue that life after death or Yahweh are every bit as much a myth passed down through cultures as fairies or big foot. The only reason they carry more weight in your mind is because you give them the generosity of more weight, they have no more evidence for or against.
So basically you are irrational. Do you thank that once upon a time the Earth may have been encased in a dense sphere of ice which melted to create our oceans? Or that the Earth may only be 4000-6000 years old?
And if you are unaware that it is an hallucination?...does that then make it objective reality?
Do you now see what I was trying to illustrate about the subjective nature of your perception and how you cannot objectively attribute 100% certainty to anything that requires your senses to relay the information to you.
The irony in that statement is off the scale Bhavv.....what is obvious is that you do not like your prejudices and beliefs questioned, so resort to pointess ad hominem.
I don't think you two get my point, if there are repeated reports of things that don't logically make sense froma typical dream state then there's odd going on here, something that needs explaining.
Ok forget everything that happens after sleep paralysis, explain all the effects leading up to it, why do we experience energy vibrations, a pounding heart that isn't pounding physically, a ring of energy around the top of the head and other peculiar energy sensations, weird sounds which get so loud it feels like your head is about to explode, some even hear radio stations, what's going on?
No, that would make me crazy and in need of mental therapy.
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You could argue that way, however objectively two of those are specific and materially definable, whereas Yahweh is intentionally undefined by the very nature of the concept within Judaism. We can potentially track the origin of the unicorn via its linguistic etymology and various defining concepts from historical references (fairies to an extent even more so as the commonly held preconceptions of fairies are attributed directly to Middle English literature rather than any specific belief system) whereas Yahweh or the precursors to Yahwey relate to an evolving concept rather than a defined material position.
It is not about whether they carry more weight in my mind or not, but about the way in which each is treated both objectively and their respective demonstrable etymology. This doesn't mean I personally believe or disbelieve, only that from my academic persepctive the value of each is different according to the histriocity and subjectivity of the example used.
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I understand that our brain does crazy stuff as we die, I don't dispute that. What I do dispute is this irrational notion to inherently link our brain going crazy as it dies to some kind of transcendence to an afterlife. I see no rational reasoning to link the two at all.
This doesn't even relate to what I said and therefore doesn't make any rational sense.
Castiel if you honestly think fairies and unicorns are materially definable / trackable, you've recently taken a few too many knocks to the head.
I was simply curious if you are equally agnostic about the ideas I presented. What is your opinion on them?
I was simply curious if you are equally agnostic about the ideas I presented. What is your opinion on them?
There are clear traceable and certifiable reasons why they have been treated with greater fervour through the ages. Yahweh has been used as a tool to control the stupid, and life after death is used to give greater meaning to life and ease fear of death.