Philosoft

Inasmuch as the "mind" part of the duality is usually taken to mean, "a thing without physical existence that directly influences physical things," I would say "meaningless."

joedad

Today's word "god" had its beginning describing behavior, not any imagined "being." When a theist today "imagines" along the lines of your definition, said theist is still doing the same thing, and the word "god" is still best understood as describing a particular human behavior, and nothing else.

joe

Peter Kirby

Are you saying that it is contradictory or that you don't understand it?

best,
Peter Kirby

Philosoft

I'm saying it doesn't mean anything to me. I have no idea what type of thing a "disembodied mind" is supposed to be and, conseqentially, no way to know how to think about those alleged things.

stretch

A disembodied mind sounds like taking a human mind and removing something from it. Removing a brain and seeing what's left of the mind.

Darn hard to imagine.

It's not like 'imagine a circle'. I would bet that nobody has ever seen a circle. We've seen things that look pretty close, but I doubt that anybody's ever drawn a perfect one.

Can you imagine n-dimensional space, for n=7, for exampe? Does it have no meaning because you can't imagine it?

-denise

Philosoft

I can crudely imagine a 7-dimensional space, like a Calabi-Yau space, or Brian Greene's "curled-up" dimensions. There are also mathematical models that represent n>3 dimensional spaces.

stretch

What does 'crudely imagine' mean? A mental 'visual' image of some sort? Some sort of semi-intuitive grasping of a concept?

Why does being able to write something symbolically via mathematics make it more 'imaginable'? Is 'imaginability' a function of the number of ways that something can be represented?

Philosoft

Sure, but it's probably not even relevant. I can't even really imagine good-old 3-dimensional space. I don't consider it a "thing," so I don't think it matters.
Well, inasmuch as space-time isn't a thing, a mathematical representation allows us to at least put a finger on its viability.

stretch

It's viability as a concept or some sort of non-material 'reality'?

Philosoft

As a concept.