The materialist always thinks they will keep finding more and more material, the smallest "thing". You will spit things infinitely and you will never see your trun nature.
Unfortunately every time the supernaturalist tried to argue something, he has been knocked down and disproven by materialism throughout centuries of history. Its on you as to which side of the bet you want to be on. Even concepts that seemed unresolvable with endless circles of purely philosophical arguments such as the atomic theory became proven after new data and physical experiment. Consciousness today seems just as unresolvable as atomic theory was to the ancient Greeks.
At which atom in a piece of metal does the temperature 20C exist?
If you think physical sciences don't have the concept of states and macro configurations, then I don't even know what to say.
I am not a supernaturalist. I would consider myself a non-dualist.
I understand that things can appear like a material, but the underlying nature of the universe is non-material. What we see as an atom is only our minds collapsing the probability of a wave.
This can all be proven with the very childish thought problem of infinite halving. To say that calculus solves this is laughable:
We can never know anything with complete precision. Length, mass, volume and other quantities can only be known to a certain level of precision. "
Do you see that, even the mathematicians say we can never know anything with complete precision. Yes, we can develop all these theories that work out in practice, but they are never 100% predictable.
My view is that almost is good enough to navigate the world.
Quantum theory is definitely not amaterial, it is a very real and physically proven theory that has been needed to create things like electronics. Obviously QM is still being worked upon and could be supplanted by another theory or corrected.
Of course I know pi to as many digits I want. It is a turing program or the series for 4*tan(1) or the Ramanujan series or any other representation you prefer. All of these are quite finite and short representations that people just wrote on pieces of paper, nothing infinite about them.
Nothing being able to be known to infinite precision has not been any trouble to us for designing and building cars, washers, computers, drills or any other machinery and tools we have made. Unless you have evidence humans need some unbelievably high level of precision to model, that is not required.
Citation needed. If what you are actually saying is successful empirical science only produces empirical observations about physical processes, you are willingly wearing blinders.
It seems pretty clearly structured to be on each person to explore experientially and explain it to themselves.
But the more things a person must close themselves off from, the less open their consideration of possibility, the more I tend to see their worldview as subservient to something else.
In this part of society it tends to be in support of rapid, high reliability problem-solving, and rational explanation thereof.
Equally well I see people who really have no idea about the expressive power and ambit of current mathematics and physics eg they probably think its just arithmetic, not knowing the power of a Turing computer for instance. Just as often also I see people simply expressing belief in something "beyond" without any evidence. I am not subservient to anything other than the basic common sense of requiring evidence for out there claims.
I can’t seem to reply to your comment deeper in the chain.
Starbuck collected data and William James turned the data into a compelling book, The Varieties of Religious Experience. Varieties draws on Starbuck's questionnaire data and names him dozens of times. Some of James’ main arguments were:
1) Against "medical materialism": a belief's origins don't settle its value. If Paul's vision is discredited by its physiology, so is the materialist's own conviction.
2) Mystical states: they carry authority for those who have them but don't bind others. Still, they break ordinary rational consciousness's claim to be the only authoritative kind. The sheer numbers of these, and the intact they have on healthy peoples’ lives, make it hard to argue rationally on an empirical basis that there is nothing there.
3) Structurally the conscious self is continuous with a "wider self" through which religious experiences come, which James calls the "more."
4) "The Will to Believe" (1896): Clifford's rule against believing on insufficient evidence is itself a personal preference, choosing to avoid error over gaining truth.
Following on that: your desire to be a reliable producer of material goods outweighs your desire to understand things that require you to take risks in assuming potentially false viewpoints. This is not common sense (whatever that means), it is an epistemological choice that seems common to you because of your educational and professional environment.
>2) Mystical states: they carry authority for those who have them but don't bind others. Still, they break ordinary rational consciousness's claim to be the only authoritative kind. The sheer numbers of these, and the intact they have on healthy peoples’ lives, make it hard to argue rationally on an empirical basis that there is nothing there.
Its not his fault he existed before information theory existed and that it has physical cost. Even if we don't know information theory, its common sense that ones mood affects ones mind and life. If you wallow in negative thoughts, you will have various problems.
It has nothing to do with education, its that my "side" has continually triumphed over and disproven beliefs in anything beyond material physical systems over the centuries, I leave others as to which side of the bet they wish to take.
I cannot say anything further without actually reading his works or reviews of his work instead of just what you claim about them, no offense of course.
Your statements here reflect a fairly typical reductive understanding of not only mystical states, but entire other areas of empirical science that you apparently don’t understand or can’t put in words.
How, precisely, are you linking information theory to this?
I didn’t claim a side for you, you created that. From my perspective it is one system. Right now you are behaving as a person running an incentivized and specialized negentropic process. You are unknowingly chasing theological propositions and claiming victory every time the perspective can be durably shifted.
To move it back into a more familiar frame: theology loads in the low res view and you claim victory while most of what you did was disaggregate pixel values, but collectively a lot of people like you can form new more accurate images in certain parts of the low res view.
While you move through doing that, though, adjacent areas open up where you have no purchase, religion steps in again, and the process repeats.
There is a core that doesn’t disaggregate. That is where the pixels are coming from. That is what you cannot see when all you want is higher resolution.
I mean this earnestly. Do you know any physics at all? Did you have physics in school? Do you think waves are "magical" or non-material? The theory of waves is one of the great works in physics and mathematics. That paper seems to posit a completely normal physical hypothesis.
