The only thing you have is your mind. The only thing you are is your mind. Everything outside of your mind is a shadow at best or often a hallucination outright.

Lots of mystic allegedly enlightened takes on what that means. To me it means I must take great care what I put into my mind. Commercials, podcasts, slop tv and movies, on and on. All content is designed with the intention of shaping your mind to the creators image of who you should be.

Be selective who you let mold your mind. Take time away from content to think for yourself and shape your own mind.

If you spend 100% of your time consuming content and never building yourself independently in silence, is there even really a thing that is you?

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Your physical brain is only a connection to your spirit. It's your spirit that performs all cognitive functions and holds all your memories. Your mind is in your spirit, not your physical body.

how would the truth or untruth of this change an individual's strategy? bill's point and downstream behavior would be the same either way

HelloπŸ‘‹, how are you doing?

It doesn't change anything as get as your comment goes. I was just thinking out loud.

My point is observable and follows from basic reasoning. Yours adds an unobservable unverifiable element without modifying the behavior outcome in any way.

Occam.

So when brain damage occurs, causes cognitive loss, and can be correlated to damage to specific brain structures.... That's "the spirit"?

The brain looses connection to the spirit in those areas, so the spirit can't do what it needs to do with body, which we see as brain damage.

The spirit itself is not damaged.

so the brain is some kind of physical "antenna" that talks to the spirit in different ways? how does it do that connection? sounds pretty material.. so where does the physical evidence end and the un-measurable spiritual stuff begin?

Side note: the Netflix movie "The Discovery" is basically this premise

Let's take this coversation to it's natural end ...

Where did the particles that make up the universe come from? Where did nothing come from?

Why shift the goal posts?

I've had these types of conversations countless times, and it always leads to this end.

Just like any abortion debate always leads to whether or not a person thinks the baby in womb is a living human or not.

Faith is belief in spite of all the evidence I guess.

Classic Christian "gotcha"

I wish more atheists were better educated so they would know the obvious answer.

Occam still says no god at the big bang. Saying "God" doesn't explain anything it just adds thousands of new problems to solve and explain. You might as well say Aliens or Magic.

Only people who have been successfully brainwashed to see the word god as a cognitive stop sign think that saying God explains anything at all.

Not to mention the fact that there have been plenty of hypotheses put forth that attempt to make sense of that moment in history while staying consistent with the rest of observed reality.

A reasonable person can concede that the scientific process at least has a chance at chipping away some of the as-yet-unexplained parts. I prefer this competitive landscape of various candidate explanations.

But I was trying to disengage and let this conversation die... and now I've re-entered it. oops

It was such an easy chance to educate bystanders that I couldn't let it go.

Always fighting to raise that rational thinking waterline in society.

I guess I'd given up a while ago. I'm unconvinced that the bystander effect has any impact. People seem to just mostly be entrenched.

I can't recall any time the person changed their mind. I have gotten DMs and zaps from people who never joined in saying that they appreciated my explanation and they learned from it.

You never know who is reading and just lurking.

Where did all the particles and energy come from that produced this never observed, never recorded and never reproduced big bang?

Talk about blind faith in something never seen.

As Vinney says, people are entrenched. This includes those the science faith.

A man of faith who doesn't understand the definition of "faith".

my "science faith" gets overturned now and then (when it's working properly). does yours?

All religions tend to morph to fit the latest world views, including the science faith.

Right now most religions are being turned inside-out by the woke cultural identity Marxism being pushed onto the world by the UN, UNESCO and the WEF.

Klaus Scwabb talks about how they will attempt to do this in his Great Reset book. Top down, bottom up, inside out.

Top down is through governments and institutions like corporations.

Bottom up is through education and brainwashing of kids in schools and embedding the ideology in areas of study.

Inside out is through churches and religion.

Bingo. It requires no faith to say everything observed says it works like this but we are currently unsure why and still studying.

It does require faith to say a magic being who man discovered before he knew why things fall down still stands as the best explanation for every question on every subject I can't answer another way.

> It requires no faith to say everything observed says it works like this but we are currently unsure why and still studying

it's almost the exact opposite of faith. it's becoming comfortable with accepting the limits of one's own understanding.

and if it makes an onlooker happier to see things through ancient lenses: look no further than the Stoics to find the same lessons with a 2,000 year patina on them.

"I don't know" is a totally acceptable answer, and the one I choose in this case (and any other that you'd falsely attribute to "blind faith").

2 points.

1. I am comfortable with knowledge having limitations. It always will. This is where we focus our studies. It does not require slapping the first lazy answer made up by a goat herder thousands of years ago over those gaps to appease my anxiety about not knowing.

2. You have a lot of questions about science but 0 questions about an all knowing all powerful all good being existing for all eternity with less explaination than science has for its answers. Turn your skepticism inward for 5 seconds instead of attacking. Only having questions for your opponents doesn't make you look smart, it makes you look like an ideologue.

Please take a week of the time you spend smugly correcting atheists to study and understand the idea of the cognitive stop sign. Then pay attention to your own cognitive stop signs, they are unique to each of us and destroy personal growth and self knowledge.

Personally I'm currently a fan of wave theory since waves show up EVERYWHERE else. The eli5 is that universe is in the rising and above 0 quarter of the wave. This is why we observe expansion. The big bang would be the waves 0 cross into positive.

What about the heart? It’s not the mind, its power can be felt in love & in heartbreak. You have your heart & its power is greater than your mind. Imo.

My family is neither a shadow or a hallucination, regardless of what some childless mystic says.

Not mysticism. Just observable physical reality, if you are willing to look. I'm a materialist atheist and I have kids. I definitely remember a time when I hadn't observed closely enough to begin to understand.

Start with the optic blindspot if you want to begin to understand.