LinuxPup

Just to clarify things a bit, the definition of a thought that I'm using is a mental content, that can be expressed in a declarative sentence (e.g. The grass is green.).

I also want to fix a mistake I made in saying that the world around us causes our thoughts... what I mean is if the world around us gives us stimuli (which it does), do I still have the freedom to think whatever I want, or am I stuck by whatever the world around me dictates I need to think. I'm not arguing right now whether the brain is the efficient cause of my thoughts, nor am I arguing whether there is a physical component to our thinking process (I believe there is), what I'm arguing, is do I have the freedom to think, or are my thoughts all pre-determined for me. You'll notice this is a derivative of the famous freewill vs. predetermined debate, but with an emphasis on thinking, beliefs, and desires. I don't doubt for a second that the physical world around us influences our thinking, but does it predetermine them all?

Eldy

From Eldy: I suspect that I exist, but I have no proof whatsoever that you exist. In fact, I think that it is someone else, and not you writing your post notes.

Self-consciousness, or self-awareness, is unique to the human being, with the possible sometime exceptions among the other primates. (My opinion)

The "I am" is the God portion of you speaking of your own awareness. You cannot get it from brains nor brain cells. You cannot get it from mind. You cannot get this "I am-ness" from anyone but God.

God told Moses, "Tell Pharaoah that 'I AM' sent you to tell you to let my people go, for I AM that I AM."

Your god-hood is expressed in your self-knowledge, which, combined with your own free will, allows you to deny the great I AM, and to reject the spiritual nature of you and me and other human beings.

We are free to serve God or to reject him.

LOVE cannot be seen, heard, smelled tasted or touched, but it exists. It cannot be measured.

The "I am" is the eternal quality of the human spirit.

I would gently reflect that atheists should refer to themselves as "I won't be very long."

Me, "I am" going to live forever. Don't ask me to prove it: I don't have that much time.

How do we work and use these little gremlins I see on my screen? I do know one:

crocodile deathroll

Hi
I will then make another Lottery analogy:
Lets assume a new kind lottery has just been announced by Tattersals, so no numbers have ever previously been drawn, then the first numbers have been drawn, then will the probability if those numbers been drawn be less next time by virtue of the fact that they have previously been drawn. If I rolled a dice and the number happened to 3 then will the probability of that number been still just as exactly one in six as before it was thrown the first time? wouldn't every number be always be one in six probability no matter how many times I roll the dice.

Now I shall take entirely different tack: that's our perception of time, have you ever considered why you are living a this particular point of time in history and not say 1 thousand years earlier. And what's more, you already well know there is somewhere in the order of 14 billion years between the Big Bang and the instance you were born, now if you were put under suspended animation for another 14 billion then if you were totally unconscious like as though you were dead then you would be just as oblivious that 14 billion years as one nanosecond of consciousness.
I do not think that it is any miracle that we are on this Earth but for that to happen by accident you have to undergo billions times more hours of unconsciousness than our hours of consciousness, but an eternity of unconsciousness simply doesn't bother us.

My theory is when you die you a no longer can possibly ever remember that you have ever been born in the first place, and since time and place in the universe is purely subjective, that too will be cancelled out. So time is not something that flows out there it only flows within your mind, the entropy of your brain.
In the universe as a whole the past, present and future all coexist together, and time is no more then a fixed dimension, so when you die no can tell you that you have lived a previous/future life. It may will be subjectively as though the your entire universe had never existed and you may well find yourself reemerging back in say the time before Mt Vesuvius erupted, being totally oblivious the any notion that you have lived a previous life. That may continue infinitum Gastalt switching backward and forwards through time until you have personally experienced the life of every one that has ever lived and ever will live and will still continue on the way.

Another way to express it is, if you imagine a book of biographies of everybody's life from the past present and future written in the finest biographical detail. So you pick up this fairly hefty book and read just one person's biography (who's name is just drawn out of a hat), from start to finish, and you are very heavily absorbed the story and the plot you feel like you are that person, the story seem so realistic that even the physical surroundings that person experiences feel as though you can touch them. But the act reaching the end out the biography renders all that into oblivion, and it is exactly as thought you had never read it. So in the interest of experience some sensation of a passage of time passage of time which can only be experienced though the phenomena of consciousness, a new name is spontaneously selected out of a hat, and you start all over again like it a one life experience, and that will continue infinitum.

John Page

Your, unsubstantiated opinion, I fear. Try this link to <a href="http://www.beyond2000.com/news/Jul_00/story_704.html" target="_blank">UCL experiments</a> and you might also want to read about the field of neuroesthetics.

Cheers, John

Eldy

From Eldy: That was a very nice reference. I enjoyed reading it. I wonder if the lab and the brain scans were measuring love, or measuring the effects, or the response to the feelings of love, which evidently originate in the emotional seat of the human being. Or perhaps the scans were showing the emotional seat of the human.

It seems to me that my emotions, when they are strong, take place in the stomach region. One gets "sick in the stomach" when she feels intense about good or bad news.

It was a great reference, and John, you are obviously a gentleman.

Kindly,

Eldy

DRFseven

Our daughter used to think that when she was small and her stomach even talked to her. She'd say, "Stomach says I shouldn't have done that."

DRFseven

Much of the thinking we do is stimulated by memories of other thoughts we've had and incorporated into a reasoning structure. But without experiential learning, we would have had NO thoughts in the first place. Same with our biology; without physical brain structure, we coudn't think. Biology and experience give us everything we build thoughts out of; outside of these "influences", there is nothing to think with or about.

John Page

Eldy:

Cars exist. I would say a Corvette has more spirit than a Nova. They're both cars, lumps of metal, exitential objects. I think the attribute of spirit is one that is conferred by the observer rather than emanting from some magical source within us (even if we conceive we have spirit).

So perhaps the "spirit" that appears to say "I am" is merely a side-effect of human cognition. The degree of spirit ascertained by the observer might be picked up from subtle data such as accent, body language or even the electrical field that surrounds us. I'm unaware of any experiments to try and isolate where our sense of spirit actually comes from, so what I just wrote was subjective opinion based on very limited facts. However, I prefer to believe this hypothesis than the Cartesian theater-type explanations.

Cheers, John

Ierrellus

Eldy,

I am not an atheist. I have no diety who threatens to punish others for believing
differently than I do. (I can do that myself. }

I am happy for you if your faith gives you senses of security and identity. But most progress comes from the insecure and the unidentified (IMO)

Ierrellus,

PAX

fwh

Ierellus

you said:
I am happy for you if your faith gives you senses of security and identity. But most progress comes from the insecure and the unidentified (IMO)

me:
If truth is a bird; doubt is its wings.