KindaGamey
Member
Is it just me or is this forum less "fun" than it was before? I'm commenting anyway so I can keep up with replies to this thread.
I loved this interview and shared it on facebook because even my skeptical friends have to give his rigorous arguments some respect. Bernardo was fantastic as always and kudos to him for getting 11+ Scientific American articles published against the materialist narrative! Even just one would be an incredible accomplishment. Can you imagine that happening like 10 to 20 years ago? It truly does seem like a new world. He's in a very unique position. I would love to hear what kind of private feedback he is getting from scientists and readers of SciAm. (I'd also love to hear what kind of private feedback Shermer got on his 'paranormal radio event' article, but we'll probably never hear the truth on that one.)
Then again, as much as I have loved Dean Radin and Rupert "Morphogenic" Sheldrake, Skeptiko has helped me see them kind of playing a religion-justification game. Like, they were believers in early life and then materialism gave them cognitive dissonance, and then they pulled apart materialism until they could get back to that comforting state of belief with intellectual rigors intact. // Not that they aren't right, but it's like a guy on youtube someone posted here that was showing the flaws in evolution - I was right there with him on the critiques until I heard the religious arguments he was trying to prop up. That soured me. I never read Bernardo's specific book on religion, but I suspect he's in the same boat. Right, but for the wrong reasons? For some reason I would trust someone more if they were raised an atheist, found the flaws, and then revised their opinions without faith/belief ever entering the picture.)
My Bernardo objection, as always, is that I don't understand how pan-psychism is written off as a crutch for leaving materialism or a baby-food version of idealism. I think it was around 1/3 of the podcast in where Bernardo was saying that a human being IS a part of the whole of consciousness (agreed), but it is also separated/individuated, like a whirlpool in the water. So.......... pseudo-psychism? semi-psychism? Is it only humans who have this magical property? Doubtful. Nature doesn't strike me as being that sloppy to be making exceptions here and there.
I think we're going to have to come to grips with the fact that everything is consciousness and things can be individuated within consciousness at least on some level, so every particle is part of the whole AND somewhat conscious in its own right. At least personally this works for me so I don't have to think about whether a virus is technically 'alive' or not. Also similarly, Alex needs to see that, yes, there can be hierarchies within a system and yet the whole system isn't necessarily top-down:
You see all those triangle patterns interwoven? There are plenty of hierarchies, but not one is in total control - at least from within the system. The system/equation that made the pattern IS.
--
Also, there was a post early on in this thread with someone stomping their foot about UFOs being only a mental phenomenon that was so wrong it made me too exhausted to refute it. There are mountains of physical evidence for UFOs. Scoop marks, indentations in the ground, not to mention the people who have reported both types of abductions -- floated out the window in an astral body kind and the reptilian you can touch standing in the living room kind. If you want to know why no one ever finds an alien notebook that was accidentally dropped on the job you might seek the answer in the fact that these beings can navigate probability streams and anything that breaks the believer/non-believer balance is corrected so as not to harm our free will to decide what we believe. It would be too disruptive otherwise. Of course what is physical evidence? Certainly not physical, it's more quanta - more narratives for us to parse. So is any of it physical or mental? I'm trying to think beyond that binary, but saying it doesn't exist in what we call the physical is overstepping in my opinion.
I loved this interview and shared it on facebook because even my skeptical friends have to give his rigorous arguments some respect. Bernardo was fantastic as always and kudos to him for getting 11+ Scientific American articles published against the materialist narrative! Even just one would be an incredible accomplishment. Can you imagine that happening like 10 to 20 years ago? It truly does seem like a new world. He's in a very unique position. I would love to hear what kind of private feedback he is getting from scientists and readers of SciAm. (I'd also love to hear what kind of private feedback Shermer got on his 'paranormal radio event' article, but we'll probably never hear the truth on that one.)
Then again, as much as I have loved Dean Radin and Rupert "Morphogenic" Sheldrake, Skeptiko has helped me see them kind of playing a religion-justification game. Like, they were believers in early life and then materialism gave them cognitive dissonance, and then they pulled apart materialism until they could get back to that comforting state of belief with intellectual rigors intact. // Not that they aren't right, but it's like a guy on youtube someone posted here that was showing the flaws in evolution - I was right there with him on the critiques until I heard the religious arguments he was trying to prop up. That soured me. I never read Bernardo's specific book on religion, but I suspect he's in the same boat. Right, but for the wrong reasons? For some reason I would trust someone more if they were raised an atheist, found the flaws, and then revised their opinions without faith/belief ever entering the picture.)
My Bernardo objection, as always, is that I don't understand how pan-psychism is written off as a crutch for leaving materialism or a baby-food version of idealism. I think it was around 1/3 of the podcast in where Bernardo was saying that a human being IS a part of the whole of consciousness (agreed), but it is also separated/individuated, like a whirlpool in the water. So.......... pseudo-psychism? semi-psychism? Is it only humans who have this magical property? Doubtful. Nature doesn't strike me as being that sloppy to be making exceptions here and there.
I think we're going to have to come to grips with the fact that everything is consciousness and things can be individuated within consciousness at least on some level, so every particle is part of the whole AND somewhat conscious in its own right. At least personally this works for me so I don't have to think about whether a virus is technically 'alive' or not. Also similarly, Alex needs to see that, yes, there can be hierarchies within a system and yet the whole system isn't necessarily top-down:
You see all those triangle patterns interwoven? There are plenty of hierarchies, but not one is in total control - at least from within the system. The system/equation that made the pattern IS.
--
Also, there was a post early on in this thread with someone stomping their foot about UFOs being only a mental phenomenon that was so wrong it made me too exhausted to refute it. There are mountains of physical evidence for UFOs. Scoop marks, indentations in the ground, not to mention the people who have reported both types of abductions -- floated out the window in an astral body kind and the reptilian you can touch standing in the living room kind. If you want to know why no one ever finds an alien notebook that was accidentally dropped on the job you might seek the answer in the fact that these beings can navigate probability streams and anything that breaks the believer/non-believer balance is corrected so as not to harm our free will to decide what we believe. It would be too disruptive otherwise. Of course what is physical evidence? Certainly not physical, it's more quanta - more narratives for us to parse. So is any of it physical or mental? I'm trying to think beyond that binary, but saying it doesn't exist in what we call the physical is overstepping in my opinion.
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