romansh

Rom,

 

i don't think Tich advocates educated discussions from what i read in the Foreword.

Quite possibly ... I was just curious about Burl's suggestion that we might.

edit ... might take a while to get my copy ... rural Canada n'all

So if our Tich had spent time with learned skeptics then we might not expect informed and educated discussion?

_{I have asked my wife to order a copy.}

_{Over the years for work I have done a bunch of leadership courses.}

_{I have never been sent on a followership course.}

_{Having said that I can't help thinking they are sides of the same [dualistic] coin.}

I am game ... but if we could do it slowly so to speak.

I like Joseph Campbell's quote.

I think it is sort of relevant here:

Religion turns poetry into prose.

I will try another tack ... here is a quote from Joseph Campbell from the Power of Myth ...

... But the ultimate mystical goal is to be united with one's god. With that, duality is transcended and forms disappear. There is nobody there, no god, no you. Your mind, going past all concepts, has dissolved in identification with ground of your own being, because that to which the metaphorical image of your god refers to the ultimate mystery of your own being, which is the mystery of the being of the world as well.

Absence of evil goes as far back as the neoplatonists, I gather

Like I said before six people and half a dozen opinions as to what spiritual is.

You must be reading something I did not mean to say in what I wrote.

So a destruction of city is not evil?

OK.

I am trying to get you to explain this dualistic thing. Antonyms don't make it understandable to me.

 

Dualism has a specific meaning in Christianity of a struggle between two opposing forces. This is rejected. Evil is not the opposite of good, it is the absence of good. There is one good, but a large number of possible evils. Evil is like a shadow and has no essence, but can be easily observed under the right conditions.

"This is rejected" By whom? Even secular folk find themselves thinking as particular actions as evil

Are you suggesting the sun when it creates a weather pattern that destroys a city etc is evil somehow or at least the pattern is evil?

Not actually a poem ... it's a letter but reads like a poem ... and definitely spiritual

April 16, 1887

My dear Friend,

I send you some of the most wonderful whiskey that ever drove the skeleton from a feast or painted landscapes in the brain of man. It is the mingled souls of wheat and corn. In it you will find the sunshine and the shadows that chased each other over the billowy fields; the breath of June; the carol of the lark; the dews of night; the wealth of summer and autumn’s rich content, all golden with imprisoned light.

Drink it—and you will hear the voices of men and maidens singing the “Harvest Home,” mingled with the laughter of children.
Drink it—and you will feel within your blood the star-lit dawns, the dreamy, tawny dusks of many perfect days.

For forty years this liquid joy has been within the happy staves of oak, longing to touch the lips of men.

Yours always,

R. G. Ingersoll

Is it communicative/noncommunicative or communicative/vague?

I am not sure of your point.

Firstly six sigma is way less than 1 %.

I would suggest using an appropriate degree of probability for the subject matter under study rather than some arbitrary number.

Regarding the Templeton Foundation ... I can`t point to any particular section, but just take your time to get a flavour of it.

It sort of a Discovery Institute 'lite'.

What is a dualistic pattern?

good/evil (bad)

moral/immoral

God being somehow separate ie traditional theistic beliefs, and to a lesser extent in panentheism

Are some of examples of dualistic patterns of thought.

Having said that I find language quite dualistic so to some extent that people accept dualism is not that surprising.

Is that bad? And what is it?

The fact that you ask the question is that bad? belies the claim that you usually don't see [think] in dualistic patterns.

And what is it? It is an observation.

Morally, ethically, spiritually. Completely responsible. What are you trying to leave out?

 

I strongly suspect you are not a double predestination Calvinist :-)

Nope I am closer to a monist.

And you are exhibiting (at least from my perspective) patterns of dualist thought.

Yes, I think people are responsible for their actions.

I would like to be clear here morally responsible?

So do you see people as morally responsible for their actions?

And despite the title ... I don't think my posted video was primarily about consciousness ... hence the the line "I am separate"

I don't find it poorly written. The editor seems imminently qualified and obviously she does not either.

 

I am interested in the citation for the 'higher power' study you mention. Not many researchers attempt spiritual topics, and if it convinced you it must be good.

 

My opinion is that much of social psychology, including this study, is pseudoscience. It has aspects of all four factors I mentioned.

Then you will find much of what the science Templeton Foundation funds to of similar dubious quality.

I would classify it as poorly written.

It is the belief that we are communing with a higher power that appears to help.

Yours ... very simply (my initial reaction) we are trapped by our desires.

As to your comment on ego ... quite often we hear comments about other people's egos etc. Sometimes we have a need to control our egos. Who is it that is trying to subdue our own ego? While I readily admit an ego is a model of what we perceive as our thought patterns (chemistry/physics patterns), I would not be without those patterns.

The second video ... for me was a recognition of the illusion of dualistic thought. We are connected regardless of how we might perceive of ourselves as separate.

Traditional religions concretize that thought, panentheism subtly enables that illusion to persist.

Very nice, Romansh. The idea of approaching conscious contact with the divine as the removal of intellectual barriers to truth rather than the erection of logical scaffoldings has a Popperian ring to it. I see the tower of Babel (one side of it, anyway) in the illustration.

 

Alma shows the danger of egoism. I think she would have escaped the doll room if she had held the door open for the tricycle boy, and avoided the temptation entirely had she not stopped to write her name.

I must admit my interpretations of the two metaphors are completely at odds to yours ... but that is OK

On a more positive note

B Alan Wallace says .... "Physicists in the late nineteenth century, when the scientific study of the mind began, regarded matter as stuff reducible to small particles and endowed with mass and spatial location. But twentieth-century physics, especially quantum mechanics, undermined this notion, replacing discrete particles of matter with the theory that all configurations of mass-energy consist of oscillations of immaterial, abstract quantities in empty space. At the most fundamental level, matter isn’t made of matter"

 

Now that is just a theory but so it is with all science as it is over time discarded for a better working model. Therefore i personally wouldn't dismiss it as woo until we find a better replacement theory.

 

Joseph

Joseph

I take your point ... the're likely is immaterial in the sense of magnetic and electric fields, gravitational warping of space, particles described as fields, etc.

In my experience though many people when reaching for the immaterial are referring to things like love, compassion, empathy and their anti-immaterial hate fear disgust. For me this kind of immaterial is written in the substrate you describe.

But then we don't want to go too far down this road for fear of being accused with pejoratives like scientism.

Should we then dismiss spirituality as mere woo and wonder because it is partially immaterial?

In my opinion unless we can bring some evidence to the table for the immaterial we should dismiss that as woo.

Of course at this point we will get into a debate that the mind is immaterial, we may go off in really poor radio analogies.

When we say immaterial we are referring to a concept that some of us have trouble in seeing the substrate it is written in.

The disagreements about AGW is an example. It demonstrates a point about belief systems.

Yes ... and remember it applies to yours as much as mine. So how do we adjudicate between our various belief systems (or more neutrally the various beliefs that are out there). And this goes back to my comment about having intuitions or throwing chicken bones; we need a reliable method and I accept there is no absolutely reliable method.

It just that evaluating our hypotheses by observation and analysis is a better [more accurate] method than just asserting some truth. At least in my perspective.

My point is Science theory is logical, but in public practice and popular understanding it typically functions as a religion. AGW is a complex subject but instead of deliberate and measured reasoning most people's logic stops at, "An authority figure says it is a fact, so I believe it."

That is why I suggest we look at scientism over centuries if not millennia Yes global warming is very complicated people have dedicated their careers to studying it. So having some Nobel Laureate in the latter stages of career as a reference just does not cut it for me. It is like Linus Pauling advocating for large doses of vitamin C; as brilliant a person he was in this case he was out of his depth and not evidence based.

Yes scientists are human too.

This is closely related to the criticisms of spirituality discussed by Progressive Christianity.

The problem with spiritualty is, ask a half dozen people what spiritualty is you will get half a dozen different answers. I might think of myself as spiritual in certain respects but it will be very different from that of an evangelical Christian and likely very different from the members of this forum. Even in The God Delusion by Dawkins, and many of his books for that matter, you can find accepting words of some kinds of spirituality, particularly of the Carl Sagan variety. The little bits I have seen of Sagan's Cosmos I found immensely spiritual.

A little bit camp but brilliant in my mind.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGK84Poeynk

I think there is compelling evidence the case for anthropogenic global warming may be grossly overstated. The data may be right, but the conclusions seem unjustified. Many informed scientists disagree with the AGW careerists.

 

...

I listened to the video and there is nothing there I had not heard before.

Well based on glacier loss, the greening (again) of Greenland, loss of sheet ice in Antarcticand Artic (North West Passage) carbonation of the oceans etc Global Warming is definitely occurring. Now the question becomes to what degree has civilization contributed to this warming.

Things to bear in mind ... our planet (life) is in a thermodynamically unstable state or far from equilibrium (the bad news), but good news is it is in a quasi steady state where the energy balances balance ... at least roughly. So we could ask ourselves what are the sources of energy fluctuations? The sun is the big one:

So here we have data up to 2005 ... not a big variation.

Of course over geological time our position in the galaxy and precession of the Earth's tilt etc can have a dramatic effect on global temperatures. But of course this is irrelevant to our current situation.

A lack of volcanic activity can also have a big effect as can cleaning up pollution.

But the question we should asking is: what effect will a small temperature rise have on our biological system that is far from chemical equilibrium? We can see a positive benefit ie an increase in growth rates consuming CO2 from the atmosphere but on the negative side we will also an increase in decay rates releasing the same recently sequestered carbon and then the previously stored carbon near the surface. Which one is quicker? I don't know. I did not hear your Nobel Laureate address this problem.

As I mentioned the oceans are being carbonated ... acidified. This will prevent calcium carbonate forming life from growing shells. They will dissolve as quickly as they are formed at least in the worst case.

Regarding being part of the natural cycle ... philosophically I agree with this wholeheartedly, mankind is part of nature and there is nothing that we do that is supernatural or unnatural. We are stardust after all and eventually we will become stars again.

And as for manipulating data:

An alternative view. http://www.factcheck.org/2015/02/nothing-false-about-temperature-data/

ps forgot to mention the increased release of methane hydrate as the oceans warm a little. Another greenhouse gas ... we don't have a good sense of what the risk is ... but it is not zero.

Not sure what you mean by cancer and vaccines

Are you suggesting there is some compelling evidence against global warming?