near to death episodes (Endings)

by dhw, Wednesday, March 05, 2008, 17:55 (5890 days ago) @ John Clinch

John Clinch writes: "Let's not cheapen such a magnificent tableau by positing meddling deities or resurrecting the old God-of-the-gaps who is always going to get squeezed out by scientific progress. Dhw is so wrong in his approach on this." - "Let us restrict ourselves to that which we CAN know about ... i.e. to test theories about living brains ... and leave everything else to the wannabe true believers (whoops, sorry, 'agnostics'.)" - You seem to have a remarkable talent for misreading texts, and then criticizing them on the basis of your own inaccurate interpretation (see my reply on 01/03 to your entry on 29/02). Your various entries under Postulation and the first quote above show that you are still missing point after point. Similarly, in your response to whitecraw you say for my benefit: "There is no 'in principle' barrier to scientific study of the origins of life." I never said there was (see 01/03 again.). But your determination to prove that I am a "true believer" and not an agnostic hardly advances the discussion. I suggest you concentrate more on your own beliefs than on mine, since (a) you are infinitely more qualified to do so, and (b) this will certainly generate far more constructive arguments. - I'd like to take the second quote in conjunction with the fact that you are open-minded about panpsychism. If by "panpsychism" you mean that the universe is a single organism endowed with some sort of intelligence, your open-mindedness and mine will have taken a giant step in the same direction. In the section of the "guide" entitled The Nature of a "Creator", one of my many speculations (and you have failed to grasp that all of these sections are speculations, not expressions of belief) reads: 'The designer may even be the universe, which may even be a body, within which the galaxies are limbs and our solar system a mere cell." In the thread entitled Intelligent Design, I was rightly taken to task for using the words design and designer, because these are tainted ... though no-one has yet come up with a suitably neutral alternative (whitecraw suggested demi-urge). But if you ignore the unwanted religious implications of the terminology and my propensity for imagery, perhaps we may find ourselves moving onto common ground. - "Restricting ourselves to that which we CAN know about", however, presupposes that we already know the limits of what we can know about, and you are no doubt referring to the physical world that can be investigated by the natural sciences. But if you are prepared to keep an open mind about panpsychism, then you can at least acknowledge the possibility of an intelligence that may not be subject to scientific research ... a form of mind that is different from ours (and may have been responsible for life on earth). From then on, we can speculate, but my speculations are inevitably more wide-ranging than yours. For instance, even if science works out how all the strands came together, it still won't remove the possibility of a universal mind, and I see no good reason why we should not speculate on the nature of such a mind. Is it conscious like ours? Are there manifestations even within human experience of different forms of consciousness and intelligence from those we are familiar with? Or even different forms of life? Of course it may be that there is no universal mind, and the strands fell into place by chance. We may never know, and you acknowledge this (which interestingly makes me wonder if it's just possible...perish the thought...that in fact deep down you are really an agnostic), but at least we can examine the evidence, and science is not our only means either of access or of examination.