Proving the Immaterial World

steve001

Member
Obviously there's much talk here about the immaterial realm transcending the material, being spiritual, etcetera... This thread is about what happens if any aspect of psi is proven (well described / quantified). When some aspect ( your choice) is proven does it become material? Does it remain immaterial?
 
Rather than material vs. immaterial I'd tend to focus on the question of whether consciousness is a primary aspect of reality, or an emergent property generated by the brain. In that regard I would say that if proven, reincarnation would tend to support the former. Unless it could be shown how brains could account for transferring the memories, causing associated birth marks and birth defects, etc.

Cheers,
Bill
 
Rather than material vs. immaterial I'd tend to focus on the question of whether consciousness is a primary aspect of reality, or an emergent property generated by the brain. In that regard I would say that if proven, reincarnation would tend to support the former. Unless it could be shown how brains could account for transferring the memories, causing associated birth marks and birth defects, etc.

Cheers,
Bill
ok
 
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Obviously there's much talk here about the immaterial realm transcending the material, being spiritual, etcetera... This thread is about what happens if any aspect of psi is proven (well described / quantified). When some aspect ( your choice) is proven does it become material? Does it remain immaterial?

I've been saying forever and repeating ad nauseum on this forum that this the wrong way to think about things. It's an old flavor of dualism that is always going to lead into contradictions. Just look at Idealism as explained by Bernardo Kastrup and that is already an entirely different way of looking at things. It also jives up with Indian Philosophy which often holds that matter IS spirit, we just don't recognize it as such. And, there is a vast continuum of increasingly "ethereal" substance between matter and the ultimate ground of all being, or what we might call Spirit or even "God". But, everything is mind, or consciousness, under these views, even matter. Immaterial vs Material is a limiting concept created by the dividing consciousness of the ego that is oblivious to any other aspects of reality other than matter.
 
I've been saying forever and repeating ad nauseum on this forum that this the wrong way to think about things. It's an old flavor of dualism that is always going to lead into contradictions. Just look at Idealism as explained by Bernardo Kastrup and that is already an entirely different way of looking at things. It also jives up with Indian Philosophy which often holds that matter IS spirit, we just don't recognize it as such. And, there is a vast continuum of increasingly "ethereal" substance between matter and the ultimate ground of all being, or what we might call Spirit or even "God". But, everything is mind, or consciousness, under these views, even matter. Immaterial vs Material is a limiting concept created by the dividing consciousness of the ego that is oblivious to any other aspects of reality other than matter.
I want member thoughts not Bernardo's.
 
I know he is, but let him and they speak for themselves.

I was speaking for myself in my first post. I just mentioned Bernardo's name because he has one of the more simple descriptions of Idealism that's out there that folks are familiar with. The point is, your question is analogously similar to asking about Black Holes using the language of Newtonian mechanics - it's too limiting of a framework to understand the phenomenon in question - you're not going to get far w/o running into problems fast.
 
I was speaking for myself in my first post. I just mentioned Bernardo's name because he has one of the more simple descriptions of Idealism that's out there that folks are familiar with. The point is, your question is analogously similar to asking about Black Holes using the language of Newtonian mechanics - it's too limiting of a framework to understand the phenomenon in question - you're not going to get far w/o running into problems fast.
Aren't many of the topics here pertaining to the immaterial?
 
Likely any smoking gun that proves something like Psi or ghosts is going to shift the paradigm toward Panpsychism, Neutral Monism, or Idealism. At that point the decision to pick one will likely be somewhat arbitrary.

It will suggest consciousness - or at least proto-conscious feelings of qualia - are a fundamental part of reality if not its firmament. So it's possible matter will be accorded mental characteristics or be seen to arise from either consciousness or something beyond matter & mind like the physicist Bohm's Implicate Order.

Though really we're not that far from this dialoge now, with Koch advocating Panpsychism, Zeilinger discussing unifying information & reality, or Tegmark suggesting Platonic Math is actually the firmament of all universes.
 
Aren't many of the topics here pertaining to the immaterial?

I personally don't think so. "Material vs Immaterial" is convenient language to use when talking about these things, but falls short of the true nature of things. That's pretty much the message I believe one finds in the mystic traditions in cultures around the world. Idealism gets much closer to this age-old wisdom and breaking psi up into two dual aspects seems kind of silly under this viewpoint, imho.
 
Here's my take on it: information is inherently immaterial. We are so accustomed to passing along information through material means that we tend not to distinguish between the medium and the message. But information exists independent of anything material. You can make a picture of a chair out of quarks or galaxies, it makes no difference. It's still a representation of a chair. You can even create conditions where you can only see a representation of a chair from only one angle. You can build an object that is a chair in one position, but is not a chair if you turn it upside down. The only conclusion you can come to is that a chair is an idea that we assign to certain objects, but it cannot be the object itself.

Therefore any situation that involves information will have an immaterial aspect to it.
 
Here's my take on it: information is inherently immaterial. We are so accustomed to passing along information through material means that we tend not to distinguish between the medium and the message. But information exists independent of anything material. You can make a picture of a chair out of quarks or galaxies, it makes no difference. It's still a representation of a chair. You can even create conditions where you can only see a representation of a chair from only one angle. You can build an object that is a chair in one position, but is not a chair if you turn it upside down. The only conclusion you can come to is that a chair is an idea that we assign to certain objects, but it cannot be the object itself.

Therefore any situation that involves information will have an immaterial aspect to it.

Interesting. A Professor @ University of Groningen has some interesting ideas linking theological/philosophical considerations to the theory information. I've only read a few pages so far though...

Ron Garret, a computer science has some thoughts about this as well.
 
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