Maybe your internal experience of redness is the same as my experience of a low piano note.

That's called synesthesia, and it exists.

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If you don't believe in God, do you believe in souls? Do you think you have a soul?

I don't believe in souls or think that I have a soul. Souls are a religious concept - no evidence of their actual existence.

There is no "evidence" for love, either, but I'm guessing you believe in that. [/quote

Actual PP here. There is evidence for love. Emotions can be observed using brain scans.

No, love can't be seen on a brain scan. The brain's reponse to love can be seen on a brain scan. Big difference. Kind of like a lightbulb shows electricity. Giving off light is just a symptom of electricity. The brain's reaction to love is just a symptom.

You'll want to show why that "brain's response" isn't "love", but rather a symptom. That's like arguing there's no such thing as "blue": only wavelengths on the visible light spectrum and brain responses.

What is arguing that? There is no way to prove that what I see as "blue" is the same thing you see as "blue." We can prove that blue = certain wavelengths and that eveyone can look at something and agree it is blue, we can't know what the other is seeing. We just can't.l

On a lighter note, this is often why I think there is "a lid for every pot" in the dating world. There are plenty of people out there who are dating and even married who I think are h i d e o u s. But someone else looked at them and thought "woah, gotta get me some of that." That is pretty good proof that we don't all see the same things.

And yet, we know that there is some objective phenomenon out there that maps to "blue". That's because, notwithstanding a small percentage of humans with a physical condition, people largely agree about the color "blue". This is actually pretty obvious. If you and I are looking at something blue, and a third guy comes along and we ask what color it is, without a hint, he'll say blue. So it's nowhere near as ambiguous as you make it seem.

Anyway, this whole "you can't put a microscope on 'love'" is a bit of a distraction. You can't put a microscope on fun, disappointment, or ennui, either. Do they exist? They're not evidence of the ineffable mysteries of the cosmos. Again, they're poetic license applied to emotional states. Hooray for those states! Still not evidence god exists, though.

Oh, you can say that about blue. But then you would flunk introductory philosophy. We can't prove that our representation of reality is objective. Even if we both say "blue", that does not mean that our mental representation is the same.

Possibly. Of course, once you get past introductory philosophy, this kind of sophistry becomes less and less useful. In short, it doesn't matter whether or not our mental representation is "the same". The experience of "blue" is obviously similar enough.

Folks who appeal to Philosophy 101 with Freshman dorm claims about how all representations of reality are subjective love the color argument. But why is is that those who propose the swapped colors idea always do so for experiences that lie on a one dimensional scale? What is so holy about shuffling colors inside a spectrum? Why not shuffle all sorts of experiences arbitrarily? Maybe your internal experience of redness is the same as my experience of a low piano note. Maybe your internal experience of watching a soccer game is the same as my experience of watching basketball. Or the same as my experience of wrapping Christmas presents. I hope that this sounds incoherent to you and that you can move step-by-step backwards to the swapped colors idea.

The swapped spectrum idea is a glorious mix of guts and timidity. While it boldly denies the physical worlds relevance to what we feel inside, it meekly limits itself to a one-dimensional spectrum, and to the electromagnetic one to boot. The sonic spectrum is too tied to physical events like shaking and vibrations for us to give the idea of a swapped sonic spectrum any creedence, and if one tries to carry the idea beyond the one dimensional spectrum, it rapidly decays into absurdity

Well Plato cared. Did he go no farther than Philosophy 101?

Anonymous wrote:So you non-believers all think when you die, that is it? What a hopeless life. If you lose a child, you believe it is just lights out and you'll never see him again?

Are you of the jewish faith? Don't they believe that death is the end?

Is the above 2 separate posters?

Death is the end of life. I don't believe in any afterlife. It's just final and inevitable. That doesn't mean I can't enjoy the life I am living or love the people I love. It's just an end, not hopeless.

So you non-believers all think when you die, that is it? What a hopeless life. If you lose a child, you believe it is just lights out and you'll never see him again?

Are you of the jewish faith? Don't they believe that death is the end?

PP, the link discusses NDEs, not OBEs.

All fine and good. I agree that simulating OBEs makes it less likely that people are really leaving their body and having experiences. I thought the folks posting the link were attempting to prove that real OBEs could be induced, which would be mind blowing. The OBE that happened this one time at band camp doesn't prove anything, in my view.

On another note, I appear to have won the argument over unicorns.

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Anonymous wrote:There have been many cases of documented out of body experiences that can not be explaned through normal scientific means. If a body and a person's mind can exist in two different physical places, that means they must be connected through a "supernatural" means, ie a soul.

We can induce out of body experiences in a lab. First done in 2007. Not so mysterious anymore.

Really? How? And a link please?

I'm not the PP, but here's a link : http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6960612.stm

NDE can be recreated, too. They've been reported by those who experienced blackouts when under extreme G forces. I don't think it happened to every subject, but enough for me to consider it as recreated in a lab.

That's not inducing an OBE, that's making someone feel like they have had an OBE. If you can do in the lab what the PP said was done with the old man and the broken arm, then I'd be convinced.

There is a drug called Ketamine that produces all of the elements of an OBE when it is injected into normal, non-dying people. In other words, an OBE is a natural, chemically induced state that the human brain enters. The trigger for an OBE is lack of oxygen to the brain and body. If you read scientific papers like these, you find that there is a completely chemical and completely non-spiritual reason for the features of every OBE.

http://www.mindspring.com/~scottr/nde/jansen1.html

Is this a direct proof that God is imaginary? No. However, it is a direct proof that the OBE (which many people use as "indisputable" proof that God and eternal life exist) has no supernatural meaning. We can scientificaly prove OBEs to be chemical side-effects rather than "a gateway to the afterlife" as many religious believers claim.

I'm curious: we've talked above about how God has miraculously intervened in the welfare of sick people. One thing that's always bugged me about this claim: Why is it that God never heals amputees? It's always someone who had a 1% chance of surviving and, lo and behold, they survived!

It's never someone getting a necessary limb back. As the Church Lady used to say, "How convenient!"

http://whywontgodhealamputees.com/

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If you don't believe in God, do you believe in souls? Do you think you have a soul?

I don't believe in souls or think that I have a soul. Souls are a religious concept - no evidence of their actual existence.

There is no "evidence" for love, either, but I'm guessing you believe in that. [/quote

Actual PP here. There is evidence for love. Emotions can be observed using brain scans.

No, love can't be seen on a brain scan. The brain's reponse to love can be seen on a brain scan. Big difference. Kind of like a lightbulb shows electricity. Giving off light is just a symptom of electricity. The brain's reaction to love is just a symptom.

You'll want to show why that "brain's response" isn't "love", but rather a symptom. That's like arguing there's no such thing as "blue": only wavelengths on the visible light spectrum and brain responses.

What is arguing that? There is no way to prove that what I see as "blue" is the same thing you see as "blue." We can prove that blue = certain wavelengths and that eveyone can look at something and agree it is blue, we can't know what the other is seeing. We just can't.l

On a lighter note, this is often why I think there is "a lid for every pot" in the dating world. There are plenty of people out there who are dating and even married who I think are h i d e o u s. But someone else looked at them and thought "woah, gotta get me some of that." That is pretty good proof that we don't all see the same things.

And yet, we know that there is some objective phenomenon out there that maps to "blue". That's because, notwithstanding a small percentage of humans with a physical condition, people largely agree about the color "blue". This is actually pretty obvious. If you and I are looking at something blue, and a third guy comes along and we ask what color it is, without a hint, he'll say blue. So it's nowhere near as ambiguous as you make it seem.

Anyway, this whole "you can't put a microscope on 'love'" is a bit of a distraction. You can't put a microscope on fun, disappointment, or ennui, either. Do they exist? They're not evidence of the ineffable mysteries of the cosmos. Again, they're poetic license applied to emotional states. Hooray for those states! Still not evidence god exists, though.

Oh, you can say that about blue. But then you would flunk introductory philosophy. We can't prove that our representation of reality is objective. Even if we both say "blue", that does not mean that our mental representation is the same.

Possibly. Of course, once you get past introductory philosophy, this kind of sophistry becomes less and less useful. In short, it doesn't matter whether or not our mental representation is "the same". The experience of "blue" is obviously similar enough.

Folks who appeal to Philosophy 101 with Freshman dorm claims about how all representations of reality are subjective love the color argument. But why is is that those who propose the swapped colors idea always do so for experiences that lie on a one dimensional scale? What is so holy about shuffling colors inside a spectrum? Why not shuffle all sorts of experiences arbitrarily? Maybe your internal experience of redness is the same as my experience of a low piano note. Maybe your internal experience of watching a soccer game is the same as my experience of watching basketball. Or the same as my experience of wrapping Christmas presents. I hope that this sounds incoherent to you and that you can move step-by-step backwards to the swapped colors idea.

The swapped spectrum idea is a glorious mix of guts and timidity. While it boldly denies the physical worlds relevance to what we feel inside, it meekly limits itself to a one-dimensional spectrum, and to the electromagnetic one to boot. The sonic spectrum is too tied to physical events like shaking and vibrations for us to give the idea of a swapped sonic spectrum any creedence, and if one tries to carry the idea beyond the one dimensional spectrum, it rapidly decays into absurdity

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Anonymous wrote:There have been many cases of documented out of body experiences that can not be explaned through normal scientific means. If a body and a person's mind can exist in two different physical places, that means they must be connected through a "supernatural" means, ie a soul.

We can induce out of body experiences in a lab. First done in 2007. Not so mysterious anymore.

Really? How? And a link please?

I'm not the PP, but here's a link : http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6960612.stm

NDE can be recreated, too. They've been reported by those who experienced blackouts when under extreme G forces. I don't think it happened to every subject, but enough for me to consider it as recreated in a lab.

That's not inducing an OBE, that's making someone feel like they have had an OBE. If you can do in the lab what the PP said was done with the old man and the broken arm, then I'd be convinced.

Well that's the point, isn't it? If they couldn't see the scientists manipulating them, they would think they were having an out of body experience, and people like you would claim it is proof of God. But now that a scientist reproduces it, it doesn't seem so special. So it's "on to the broken arm baby". And then onto the next example of paranormal activity, and the next. But as for OBE, this link is just one example. You can put a current across the temporoparietal junction and achieve the same effect. http://www.jneurosci.org/content/25/3/550.full Some people on Salvia have out of body experiences.

If you want to zap your brain and take salvia, come back and let us know if these did not qualify as "real".

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If you don't believe in God, do you believe in souls? Do you think you have a soul?

I don't believe in souls or think that I have a soul. Souls are a religious concept - no evidence of their actual existence.

There is no "evidence" for love, either, but I'm guessing you believe in that. [/quote

Actual PP here. There is evidence for love. Emotions can be observed using brain scans.

No, love can't be seen on a brain scan. The brain's reponse to love can be seen on a brain scan. Big difference. Kind of like a lightbulb shows electricity. Giving off light is just a symptom of electricity. The brain's reaction to love is just a symptom.

You'll want to show why that "brain's response" isn't "love", but rather a symptom. That's like arguing there's no such thing as "blue": only wavelengths on the visible light spectrum and brain responses.

What is arguing that? There is no way to prove that what I see as "blue" is the same thing you see as "blue." We can prove that blue = certain wavelengths and that eveyone can look at something and agree it is blue, we can't know what the other is seeing. We just can't.l

On a lighter note, this is often why I think there is "a lid for every pot" in the dating world. There are plenty of people out there who are dating and even married who I think are h i d e o u s. But someone else looked at them and thought "woah, gotta get me some of that." That is pretty good proof that we don't all see the same things.

And yet, we know that there is some objective phenomenon out there that maps to "blue". That's because, notwithstanding a small percentage of humans with a physical condition, people largely agree about the color "blue". This is actually pretty obvious. If you and I are looking at something blue, and a third guy comes along and we ask what color it is, without a hint, he'll say blue. So it's nowhere near as ambiguous as you make it seem.

Anyway, this whole "you can't put a microscope on 'love'" is a bit of a distraction. You can't put a microscope on fun, disappointment, or ennui, either. Do they exist? They're not evidence of the ineffable mysteries of the cosmos. Again, they're poetic license applied to emotional states. Hooray for those states! Still not evidence god exists, though.

Oh, you can say that about blue. But then you would flunk introductory philosophy. We can't prove that our representation of reality is objective. Even if we both say "blue", that does not mean that our mental representation is the same.

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Anonymous wrote:There have been many cases of documented out of body experiences that can not be explaned through normal scientific means. If a body and a person's mind can exist in two different physical places, that means they must be connected through a "supernatural" means, ie a soul.

We can induce out of body experiences in a lab. First done in 2007. Not so mysterious anymore.

Really? How? And a link please?

I'm not the PP, but here's a link : http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6960612.stm

NDE can be recreated, too. They've been reported by those who experienced blackouts when under extreme G forces. I don't think it happened to every subject, but enough for me to consider it as recreated in a lab.

That's not inducing an OBE, that's making someone feel like they have had an OBE. If you can do in the lab what the PP said was done with the old man and the broken arm, then I'd be convinced.

Sorry, but this is just magical-thinking. No different than deja vu, or other tricks of cognition.

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Anonymous wrote:There have been many cases of documented out of body experiences that can not be explaned through normal scientific means. If a body and a person's mind can exist in two different physical places, that means they must be connected through a "supernatural" means, ie a soul.

We can induce out of body experiences in a lab. First done in 2007. Not so mysterious anymore.

Really? How? And a link please?

I'm not the PP, but here's a link : http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6960612.stm

NDE can be recreated, too. They've been reported by those who experienced blackouts when under extreme G forces. I don't think it happened to every subject, but enough for me to consider it as recreated in a lab.

That's not inducing an OBE, that's making someone feel like they have had an OBE. If you can do in the lab what the PP said was done with the old man and the broken arm, then I'd be convinced.

15:47 here. I'm also the poster who experienced a NDE. I was a theist at the time and it was not a religious experience for me. There was no communication either to or from a god in my experience. When it was time to leave that peaceful place, I said to myself "well, I need to find a way out of this" and was almost instantly back in reality. My path to atheism started in the few years after that experience, actually.