Well, the possibility at least exists that there are such causal schemas, perhaps only partially overlapping the boundaries of the world we inhabit with our current abilities and understanding. Hence the analogy between magic and advanced technology. viz also my lounge post on the realms of the amoeba and the human. Carlos Castaneda's books all revolve around this premise.

Well, any magic I have ever heard about has involved performing some non-arbitrary action or ritual in order to engender a result. What you have described is just causing something to happen by virtue of thought alone, nothing magical about that!

. (i) observing that stars had realigned themselves to spell M-A-G-I-C or (ii) using the most powerful planck scale imaging device to discover G-O-D-S-W-O-R-K spelled out in quarks in a (every) hydrogen nucleus or (iii) a live severed head of person able to speak see hear think etc — 180 Proof

Interesting that those are all anthropocentric examples. Perhaps the stars and quarks do spell out those messages, but we have not yet learned the language.

What is "magic" anyway except an alternative causal schema? Any system in which a causes b according to some rule c is equally comprehensible, whether it is magic or physics.

A lot of speculative inference, but so far hangs together, and seems plausible.

Not sure where you’re trying to go, or if I’m understanding you correctly, but I’ll say no, it isn’t. I can conceive of a world (reality) that doesn’t include thought — Pinprick

Says the thinking being.....

Simmel definitely had his ups and downs, but overall very stimulating.

Next up, for a larf, Yuval Noah Harari's history and prophecy of humanity:
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
and
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

Is there something special about first marriages? — TiredThinker

Yes. It teaches you how to start over from scratch.

Talking about the role quantum mechanics plays in any purported 'theory of consciousness' is like talking about the role QM plays in a theory of music – reductionist pseudo-scientistic nonsense — 180 Proof

Is it though? Moving from the quantum to the macroscopic world is essentially just a type of phase-transition. Quantum biology seems a solid field of study to me:

"Inspired by the surprising phenomenon interpreted as long-living quantum coherence in warm, noisy, complex and yet remarkably efficient energy transfer systems, many models of environment-assisted quantum transport have been proposed."

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsif.2018.0640

Just because we can't currently envision how living systems might create a framework for delaying quantum decoherence doesn't mean there isn't one. Quantum tunneling is an improbable event that is part of everyday technology now.

The whole concept of God doesn't need to be philosophically justified. Historically it has been something that humanity needs both psychologically and socially. Just like ethics. The negative impacts that have resulted from the gradual degradation of the role of religion as it has been supplanted - but not effectively replaced - by an empty scientific-cum-technical mentality are well-documented and lamented by a host of social philosophers.

You can't reduce a physically instantiated non-physical to a non-physical. It can't exist in that form. It's always a two part relation and irreducible. — Mark Nyquist

If it's irreducible then the same applies to the physical portion. So either way we are then talking about a mental-physical hybrid which is irreducible to either physicality or mentality. This also works for me.

Information, for example, exists independently of its physical instantiation. Exactly the same information can be held by a variety of physical media. Mental phenomena exist, and as far as I'm aware no one has reduced those to physical (although lots of people claim to do so). Our normal experience is of a world that encompasses both mental and physical phenomena and so saying that existence is physical is just a non sequitur, or an invalid inference. Existence is a more all-encompassing category than physicality; physicality is a species of existence.

Do you disagree that the non-physical is physically non-existent? — Mark Nyquist

Well, that's the whole question, is physicality equivalent with existence? I see no reason to assume there aren't more all-encompassing categories than physicality.

non-physical is by definition non-existent. — Mark Nyquist

No it isn't, you just defined it that way now!

Access or reconstruct knowledge, not possess it — Possibility

Using knowledge is possessing knowledge.

You don't have to be able to define knowledge in order to possess knowledge. Everyone on the planet knows a lot of things (which usually correlates to the ability to act successfully in various contexts).

"Next up, "Civilsation and its discontents" by freud,and a whole stack of freud books in the post. — Protagoras

One of my favourites.

It's a cautionary tale of what can happen if people's own ideas about their gender identity are given primacy. — baker

Yeah, I guess certain peoples' claims need to be considered in context....Hmmm.

Oh, you mean it was all a scam?

What happened? Women in prison were raped by men who identified themselves as women — baker

Not sure how this example applies. Sexual predators rape indiscriminately, especially in prison.

That said, fully in favour of a switch to generic genderless pronouns, which has been pushed for for decades and affects a much higher percentage of people. I tend to oscillate between "they", "he or she", or just "she" as a counter. "They" is clearly superior; I should stick with that. No doubt it'll annoy a tiny minority of people again who either want a personal pronoun or are militantly cis, but I object to the assertion that I should care. — Kenosha Kid

Quite. Language should determine its own usage.

One of the reasons "boomers" ignore you is that we have been around the block a few times and find many of you "gender specialists" inordinately self-involved. "Sexual identity" is a new issue for you, but is not a new issue historically. Lots of people have dealt with it more and less productively over the last century. — Bitter Crank

:up:

In fact, most of the PC issues smack of this kind of self-involvement. I think that choosing your own pronoun is like choosing your own name and I fully support anyone's right to do so. Just don't try to enforce a general modification of the language. From the statistics I could find, non-binary individuals comprise approximately one-third of one percent of the population. So tell me if you need to be referred to as they, heck, even remind me, I'll respect that. But expecting 99.7% of everyone else to just jump in line and adopt radical linguistic changes is a tall order. And I could see where it would offend some people. I was educated when even using "they" as an impersonal singular pronoun was incorrect, and I regularly still do use "his or her" when I am training people. And I intend to go on doing so, and maintain that style in my writing. If someone complains, I'll acknowledge it, but it is my language, it is part of who I am, so I would expect that to be respected for the same reason that non-binary folks expect their wishes to be respected.

The features of reality of which we are aware are pragmatically determined. You can play a completely novel tone to a cat such that its brain does not even register receiving the tone. But pair that tone with food, lo and behold, the cat's brain suddenly and thereafter registers the tone, whether or not food accompanies. That is cognized reality. There are, I am sure, many, many dimensions of information of which we have no awareness, simply because we have not developed or discovered practical activities or applications related to the cognition thereof.

Isn't that what faith and religion are about? Irrational, blind, sudden and absurd just like life? — Corvus

This I think says it all. We admire reason and logic and try to live up to them as standards, but they don't capture everything. I would say not just faith and religion, but life is not ultimately reasonable. Which is why I find a lot of contention over fine points of logic to be frustrating, especially when there are clearly extra-logical factors involved.

but I when I am in some kind of crisis I do pray and I feel that it helps, and does lead me forwards positively usually. — Jack Cummins

Yes, I believe that there is some kind of strong underlying motivation which often relates to the consciousness or feeling of being faced with some kind of major problem along with doubts as to our ability to meet the challenge and fear about the outcome if we don't. Some people may even experience the entire modern world in this way.

Sounds like the Kierkegaardian existential situation. A belief that might motivate the believer leaping into the abyss of faith ... — Corvus

If accepting as true what you want so badly to believe is true is the definition of faith it seems a poor accomplishment....almost like signing a false confession under duress.

Pascal's wager comes to mind. — Down The Rabbit Hole

Yes, I had never heard of Pascal's wager until I read it on here a while ago. It figures in my own philosophy as what I call "the ontological gamble"; we stake our very existence on the validity of our beliefs. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the being of consciousness is equivalent to its beliefs. That's why it's so critical to define what it means to truly believe something, versus just saying that you believe it.

My comments are about the ones I personally have interacted with including on here, which I qualified elsewhere. I admitted that the one's who don't proselytize are drowned out (in their silence) by what could well be an overly-vocal minority.

Think about it. When you "actually" understand something, then you establish a link between your mind and whatever minds set the precedent for your thoughts. "Every truth is consonant with every other truth." Truth is the ultimate mechanism for creating continuity of consciousness.

Suppose, just for a second, that what you are, as a cognizant, thinking being, is in some way materially contingent on information transferred forward through the mechanism of material-social artefacts (i.e. the ideas that constitute the essence of your being are what has been handed forward through the generations). If that were the case, I would spend as much time absorbing as much "existentially meaningful" historic material (i.e. books) as I could get my hands on. The more ancient, the better. :mask:

It isn't about what philosophy is "correct," per se, I think; I think it is about what the most sincerely intelligent people have sought to convey to posterity.

:up:

I hear you. But I still think that there should be freedom of religion, not freedom from religion.

How do overzealous atheists not see their dawkinsism is just a secular religious substitute!? — Protagoras

The do say "love is blind".....

The whole concept of the devil is another thing altogether. However elsewhere I've discussed how the universe seems to be propelled by the dynamism of the tension of opposites, so it isn't an absurd premise that there could be a counterbalancing.

However I'm not sure how that applies to your question.

Isn't that just an old apologist's canard? I'm sure it is not intended this way by you but it has a patronizing tone to it. Atheism equals disfunction or disruption, rather than a genuine expression of freethought — Tom Storm

I've have never yet encountered an atheist who did not treat atheism like a substitute religion, which is the ultimate irony, as I said. Yes, my comment was tongue in cheek. There may well be philosophically sincere atheists, and, if so, they probably do get drowned out by the noisy and offensive ones. If that's you, then I sincerely apologize. As I mentioned, I do think this tends to be more of a social than a philosophical issue.

Hardly. You are trying to figure out how many angels fit on the head of a pin.

Like I said, if you define god as "the most advanced sentient being in the universe" then god it is an absolute fact that god exists. That's a pragmatic solution. I don't buy into the whole realism/anti-realism argument. Not everyone does. If you are trying to say it's just me then you are the one who is out of touch with reality.

The idea of putting the conflict between realist and antirealist approaches to science aside is also a recurring theme in some accounts of pragmatism, and quietism. Regarding the first, Peirce ([1992] 1998, in “How to Make Our Ideas Clear”, for instance, originally published in 1878) holds that the content of a proposition should be understood in terms of (among other things) its “practical consequences” for human experience, such as implications for observation or problem-solving. For James ([1907] 1979), positive utility measured in these terms is the very marker of truth (where truth is whatever will be agreed in the ideal limit of scientific inquiry).Many of the points disputed by realists and antirealists—differences in epistemic commitment to scientific entities based on observability, for example—are effectively non-issues on this view

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-realism/#PragQuieDialPara

This.

So, I am a dyed-in-the-wool pragmatist and the whole realism/anti-realism debate really doesn't apply.

If you can couch your dilemma outside of those terms I can comment, but as it stands I can't say anything meaningful about it. :confused:

Not being brainwashed as a child, usually. — Kenosha Kid

I had absolutely zero religious training and I'm not even slightly inclined to atheism. My sense of incredulity at the magnificent complexity of the universe only reduces that further.

Ok, but I won't be able to give this my full attention during work hours. I'll read it more thoroughly and get back to you later in the day.

I think the Atheist has specific reasons for disbelieving in god. Probably some deep psychological trauma where they feel they were let down and abandoned.

From a purely pragmatic perspective of course, you are correct: agnosticism - in the sense of withholding or suspending judgment - is eminently the more sensible position.