Are you religious?

[marshbrewer]

as well as Fly Fishermen & Hot Tubbers

Still waiting for the Celtic Reconstructionist Paganism option, but we're used to being treated like this by you Christian types ~ you now, invading our lands, nicking our festivals, killing our high priests, excluding us from internet forum poll options, that sort of thing.

 

[MrRook]

Still waiting for the Celtic Reconstructionist Paganism option, but we're used to being treated like this by you Christian types ~ you now, invading our lands, nicking our festivals, killing our high priests, excluding us from internet forum poll options, that sort of thing.

At least your women aren't getting ravaged.

 

[Hoppyland]

current evidence and thought seems to indicate that primitive (single-celled and simpler) life is probably fairly abundant in the universe, but complex (multi-celled) life, and in particular advanced complex life, is probably very rare, and possibly vanishingly rare.

Really?? I was under the impression that there was no evidence whatsoever of life even existing at all, let alone being abundant, elsewhere in the universe, irrespective of its complexity.

.Development continues and eventually the synthetic body is dispensed with and mind is liberated from material constraints.

Ah, so you are religious then. My view would be that "current evidence and thought" - provided that the "thought" was based on scientific investigation and not mumbo-jumbo - seems to indicate that the mind is purely a function of activity in the brain, and therefore cannot possibly be "liberated" from this "constraint". No physical brain, no mind at all, seems to me the only likely scenario.

 

[Rodj]

Really?? I was under the impression that there was no evidence whatsoever of life even existing at all, let alone being abundant, elsewhere in the universe, irrespective of its complexity.

There is no evidence, meaning we have not yet found any. However, I did say "probably": current hypotheses suggest that where the conditons are suitable life (simple) will come into existence. However there is then an enormous and difficult jump to get from simple to complex, and suitable conditions for the jump and for maintenance after the jump are probably vanishingly rare. If you are interested in pursuing this, I suggest Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee's "Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe" (Copernicus, 2000) as a good starting point.
Am I religious? I don't know - depends on what you mean by religious. I certainly reject all the standard deistic religions. I have sympathies with Jain, although as it essentially involves belief in not hurting anything and being nice to everyone it is clearly a hopelessly impractical non-starter. I'd put myself down as 1% Jain, 1% Buddhist, and 98% a mish-mash of other things which are far too complex to explain (even if I could) and are still washing around in my head trying to sort themselves out. (I voted "other" in the poll.)

 

[Rodj]

At least your women aren't getting ravaged.

...and some of them are beginning to complain about it.

 

[An Ankoù]

the mind is purely a function of activity in the brain, and therefore cannot possibly be "liberated" from this "constraint".

I'm astonished and saddened to hear this from a fellow home brewer. Isn't this what we drink beer for?

 

[Rodcx500z]

We cannot be the only one's in the universe, we haven't yet found away to traverse infinity yet and they whoever they are haven't and may be farther up the road than us, The enterprise works in theory we just don,t have the technology to build it, maybe I should be mining borite on planet x, is it to early for a beer

 

[Rodj]

To answer Q1, I think you'd need to define what you mean by "God".

To answer Q2, No. because this composite immaterial mind doesn't correspond to "Supreme Being"

I don’t really know what “god” means, or what one is. I left that open. I have been to places where gods are abundant - every tree has a spirit which is held to be a god. (In Malaysia I stayed for some time with a family, on several occasions. A nearby large uncultivated undeveloped area had tall grass and scrub, and two narrow but paved roads going through it, perpendicular to each other. There was very little traffic on either road, possibly because of which drivers (often of motor-bikes or motor-scooters) drove too fast. At one point the roads crossed. Because of the vegetation, when approaching the cross on either road a driver could not see if there was anything approaching the cross on the other road. At the cross there was a large tree; and at the base of the tree there was a shrine (these are common) which always had fresh fruit offerings on it. I enquired about why there was always a fresh offering. The answer: there are a lot of collisions at that cross-road, and some people have been killed there in collisions. It is obviously because the god of the tree is angry, so the offerings are to placate him. I enquired about the possibility of cutting down a bit of the scrub so that drivers approaching the cross could see if anything was coming along the other road. No-one had thought of that; why should they - the god in the tree was to blame. Nothing was done. The offerings did not work, the god in the tree remained pissed off and continued to orchestrate collisions.)

Does there need to have been a “Supreme Being” at the start? Suppose there was nothing at the start, then just the stuff that made a big bang. The composite immaterial mind then develops.
Maybe then there is a big crunch, and the composite immaterial mind survives it and is thus the supreme being for the next big bang.

Maybe fishing is easier than thinking about all this. (I’m not familiar with Star Trek beyond Kirk, Spock, Uhuru, etc. “Borg” does not mean anything to me. Sorry.)

 

[Rodj]

We cannot be the only one's in the universe, we haven't yet found away to traverse infinity yet and they whoever they are haven't and may be farther up the road than us

Have a look at post #34 (mine) in "Should we stop eating fish and chips?"
https://www.thehomebrewforum.co.uk/threads/should-we-stop-eating-fish-and-chips.82664/page-2
in particular the PDF attachment "Appendix A - Von Neumann probes", and especially the final couple of paragraphs.
I find it rather worrying that we might have such an awesome responsibility and we are making such an incredible f-up of it all. I just hope that we are not the only ones, and that the others have more sense. That is also part of the motivation underlying the project I proposed in the PDF attachment "[If We Fail project]".

 

[Hoppyland]

I'm astonished and saddened to hear this from a fellow home brewer. Isn't this what we drink beer for?

Ah, yes, possibly a sad situation. If the reason that we drink beer is to feel better, or at least different in mood and outlook, then almost certainly the mechanism that achieves this is chemical changes in the bloodstream that effect chemical changes in the brain, (usually known as intoxication). If our immortal souls, or "non-corporeal minds" were independent of our brains, then this should not work. Presumably the body might become wobbly as the alcohol exerts its influence, but the mind should be totally unimpaired.
Hang on..... What am I thinking is sad??
Would I want to be able to drink lots of beer, fall on the floor maybe, and still have crystal-clear thought processes?
Or would I prefer to drink a moderate amount of beer of an evening, feel a lot more chirpy, talkative and sociable (but definitely different because the alcohol had affected my brain - and therefore my mind)?
I think the former would indeed be a sad situation

 

[Hoppyland]

There is no evidence, meaning we have not yet found any.

Yep, completely agree. But your comment is totally loaded. "meaning that we have not yet found any" implies that you believe that there is evidence, and it will be only a matter of time before we discover it. This is indistinguishable from a religious belief - both are predicated on faith in the unknown.

current hypotheses suggest that where the conditons are suitable life (simple) will come into existence.

What a load of tosh! Current hypotheses based upon what?? There is only certain evidence of life beginning once on one planet - ours. It is very far from certain how this occurred. It is therefore impossible to assign probabilities, let alone to assert that life "will" come into existence. Again, this expression of absolute certainty is symptomatic of religious faith, and bears no relation to genuine scientific investigation.

 

[An Ankoù]

Again, this expression of absolute certainty is symptomatic of religious faith, and bears no relation to genuine scientific investigation.

The difference between religious faith and scientific "faith" where we formulate a hypothesis and then doggedly seek to prove or disprove it, is not as great as it first appears. Look at the work the Curies put in until they were able to isolate polonium and then radium, until then it was just speculation nothing was proven until it was proven. Look at the time and money invested in the Cerne particle collider in an attempt to find a particle that gives substance to everything (they won't find it, by the way, as I have it on a bed of cotton wool in a jam jar in my garage next to my lump of the True Cross) the existence of Higg's boson was theoretical and speculative when the Nobel prize was awarded on its account and claims that it has now been found might go the same way tomorrow as the phlogiston theory did 300 years ago. In fact there are certain similarities.
The trouble with speculation in the "supernatural order" is the necessary absence of empirical evidence, which exists in the natural order. Certainly plenty of work is being done in the field of parapsychology Just as dogged, just as bloody-minded as the "scientific" investigator. Pinning down what counts as evidence is the problem.
I wonder if (just for the sake of argument) it could be shown conclusively that God exists or that there was a state of being where disembodied souls survive death, then we would then consider God or Heaven to be part of the "natural" order thus expanding our view of what nature is and what is amenable to science.

 

[Rodj]

your comment is totally loaded.

The comment is totally neutral.

What a load of tosh! Current hypotheses based upon what??

Suggest you learn about current hypotheses.

 

[Clint]

Mumbo jumbo...it could be that you know...
Say it...mumbo jumbo....rolls off the tongue...

 

[dad_of_jon]

Beer is my religion.
take it away homer....

 

[Hoppyland]

I wonder if (just for the sake of argument) it could be shown conclusively that God exists or that there was a state of being where disembodied souls survive death, then we would then consider God or Heaven to be part of the "natural" order thus expanding our view of what nature is and what is amenable to science.

What a very strange question!
As far as I'm concerned, there is no "natural" or "supernatural" world. There is simply the world, or universe, or whatever you'd like to call it. From my perspective, the purpose of science is to make our best attempt to understand how this "reality" functions. The scientific method is to look at unknowns and to wonder what mechanisms might be in place to explain these phenomena. Then, to build upon previous knowledge of such topics, and formulate a possible explanation as to what might be going on. So far, no different from philosophy. The crucial thing is the next step. Having devised a possible explanation, the scientific method requires the formulation of a test, which the "explanation" (aka hypothesis) might pass or fail. In most cases these days, there is an element of probability involved. Perhaps unfortunate, but true.
Therefore "science" - or the attempt to understand our world using the scientific method - can never really "prove" or "disprove" anything beyond the most obvious and banal (e.g. if I cut your head off you will die. Probability 100% - well, definitely so if I further destroy your head to so obviate the miniscule probability of surgical re-attachment).
Everything is amenable to science. But science can only illuminate the nature of what things really are, and how they interact. Science has nothing to say, and cannot have anything to say, about why they are that way. That speculation falls firmly within the realms of philosophy or theology. Some would say that such speculation has legitimacy, others that it is simply idle speculation since it has no basis in empirical evidence.

 

[Hoppyland]

Suggest you learn about current hypotheses.

Could you point me to a couple sources? A totally honest question, by the way!

 

[An Ankoù]

Everything is amenable to science.

I'm glad you found it an interesting speculation.
I would consider science and theology, together with mathematics, politics etc. etc. all to be branches of philosophy. Certainly, science and theology rarely, if ever come into contact let alone overlap, but I don't agree that everything is (immediately) amenable to science and that was the point of my observation. Popper, for example, in his falsification principle, thought that for something to be amenable to science, we must be able to show that it's false. We may not have the technology today, but we can at least define what we would need to show that it's false. This is a good starting point as it would suggest that the existence of God or Heaven are not amenable to science as the cannot be falsified and we cannot imagine any way in which we could show them to be false. But that's today. In the future we may be able to define a way in which God, Heaven (all the angels and saints etc. etc. and the pixies at the bottom of my garden) can be shown to be false. And as soon as we can do this means their existence becomes a matter for scientific speculation. Granted this all hinges on being able to define a way of falsifying the hypothesis.
More to come, but duty calls.

 

[Hoppyland]

"it would suggest that the existence of God or Heaven are not amenable to science as the cannot be falsified and we cannot imagine any way in which we could show them to be false. But that's today. In the future we may be able to define a way in which God, Heaven (all the angels and saints etc. etc. and the pixies at the bottom of my garden) can be shown to be false. And as soon as we can do this means their existence becomes a matter for scientific speculation. Granted this all hinges on being able to define a way of falsifying the hypothesis.

Again, I'm a little surprised here. In my mind, the scientific method is predicated upon testing whether something is likely (and these days, increasingly, that means assigning a statistical probability) to be true. The scientific method can never really "falsify" anything (I believe that to think so is to misunderstand the meaning of "null hypothesis"). Nor can it "prove" anything. I suppose that my approach to this reflects more that of a biologist than a physicist, but for me the result of any "test" has to have a caveat - how likely is this result to be universally applicable.
But, perhaps I am also straying into the realm of religion if I say that everything is amenable to scientific investigation. Perhaps the "scientific method" is my religion. Personally, I don't think so. It governs pretty much all of the actions in my life, admittedly, but at least my life and my thoughts are as entirely evidence-based as I can make them.
My wife always reckoned I was actually planted in her life by the Vulcans!

 

[An Ankoù]

The scientific method can never really "falsify" anything

Good morning Hoppyland.
We are almost certainly talking at cross-purposes here. Popper's principle was about scientific method, not about trying to use science to disprove the existence of (for example) God.
If we formulate a hypothesis, he argues, we must be able to say by what means we could show that hypothesis to be false. If we can do so, then we can do science, if not then the subject is not amenable to science.
Let's suppose our observation leads us to propose that the Earth is, while a bit bumpy, essentially flat. We can devise methods by which we might show that to be wrong, eg., going to an observation point well away from the surface and seeing that we have in fact a rotating sphere.
Similarly, the phenomenon of ships' masts sinking below the horizon might lead us to wonder if the Earth's surface were not curved. We could check whether our theory was false in the same way. Our method shows us that the Earth's surface is indeed curved, but it might have shown us otherwise. We had devised a method which might have shown our hypothesis to be false (even though it isn't) and so according to Popper, the question is amenable to science.
My point was that we haven't yet found a way of demonstrating that "God exists" is false and so the issue is not amenable to science. In fact many would argue that the declaration is, itself, meaningless. Conversely, if we could come up with a reliable method of showing that God does not exist, other than eschatological verification, then we can start doing science.
No doubt Popper doesn't have the last word on the matter. Nevertheless, it's certainly worth looking him up. It works for me.

Perhaps we should move our discussion to a philosophy forum as we've moved a long way away from home brewing and from the original poll. Just googled this to see if there was anything interesting out there:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/search?Search=science