Lying for Jesus, Lying for Epicurus

[peter2...@gmail.com]

What's this about Epicurus, you might ask. It's simple. This is about the two most popular opinions
of Americans of what happens when one dies, and about one way it affects the behavior of all too many
holders of one opinion or another. [Of course, the use of Epicurus's name is purely for convenience:
hardly anyone thinks of him when pondering the mystery of death.]

Epicurus gave one opinion, about which he expounded at length, confident about its truth: oblivion.
Jesus gave the other: a life of eternal happiness, provided one satisfies certain conditions.
His statements about heaven were very upbeat, and not at all like the cartoons
depicting people with wings playing harps on clouds.

Many of those who confidently hold one or the other of these opinions are nevertheless insecure
on some deep level. This was brought home to me in the following article,
which expounds very articulately about the ways creationists "lie for Jesus."

https://www.proof-of-evolution.com/lying-for-jesus.html#INV

A lot of what he writes about will be familiar to old-timers here, because he mostly writes about how
creationists feel their core beliefs to be threatened by evolution, and they are consequently impelled to argue against it. But their arguments are inherently weak,
causing many of them resort to such practices as:

"Quote Mining: Quote mining is citing quotes out of context to make the author or speaker seem to be saying something different than what he was saying. Creationists often "quote mine" evolutionists to make them appear to be saying that there's no evidence for evolution.
Misrepresenting the Evidence
Slander: Accusing scientists of purposely altering the facts when there's no evidence it happened (and lots of reasons to believe it can't)."

I strongly recommend reading the whole article to anyone not already familiar
with these tactics.


But now, let's look at the other side. I suspect that a great deal of the hostility
that all too many regulars show towards me ultimately has its roots in the way I confront them
with a theory of Intelligent Design (ID) which dispenses with supernatural designers.

More importantly, I have very specific hypotheses as to when the design took place,
and what kind of entities the designers were, and when they did their work,
in my most
well developed hypothesis:
Directed Panspermia (DP), which challenges the reflex belief that life as we know it
developed on earth through natural chemical evolution, with no intelligent
input.
Anti-ID types are accustomed to ID proponents giving no serious attempt at giving any information like this,
and they are somewhat at loss when presented with hypotheses that do give plenty of it.

True, my DP hypothesis says nothing about evolution and little about designed features,
but that is still enough to produce discomfort: once the nose of the ID camel is in the tent,
there is no telling how much more of it can get inside, nor how much the DI (Discovery Institute)
will try to do with it.

This is one reason why many of them lash out at me with dirty debating tactics reminiscent
of what the linked webpage says about creationists.


Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
University of South Carolina
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

PS This is just an introduction. I will have much more to say about almost everything,
in several posts this week.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Tuesday, June 20, 2023 at 8:25:13 PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:

> What's this about Epicurus, you might ask. It's simple. This is about the two most popular opinions
> of Americans of what happens when one dies, and about one way it affects the behavior of all too many
> holders of one opinion or another. [Of course, the use of Epicurus's name is purely for convenience:
> hardly anyone thinks of him when pondering the mystery of death.]
>
> Epicurus gave one opinion, about which he expounded at length, confident about its truth: oblivion.

Epicurus, like Democritus, was an "atoms and void" materialist. Materialists always have to
account for the existence of consciousness, and Epicurus did it in a simple manner.

"Having established the physical basis of the world, Epicurus proceeds to explain the nature of the soul (this, at least, is the order in which Lucretius sets things out). This too, of course, consists of atoms: first, there is nothing that is not made up of atoms and void (secondary qualities are simply accidents of the arrangement of atoms), and second, an incorporeal entity could neither act on nor be moved by bodies, as the soul is seen to do (e.g., it is conscious of what happens to the body, and it initiates physical movement).

"Epicurus maintains that soul atoms are particularly fine and are distributed throughout the body (LH 64), and it is by means of them that we have sensations (aisthêseis) and the experience of pain and pleasure, which Epicurus calls pathê (a term used by Aristotle and others to signify emotions instead). Body without soul atoms is unconscious and inert, and when the atoms of the body are disarranged so that it can no longer support conscious life, the soul atoms are scattered and no longer retain the capacity for sensation (LH 65)." [Section 4: 4. Psychology and Ethics
-- https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epicurus/

Here readers can begin to see why I wrote about Epicurus being confident that death entails oblivion.
The following passage, a bit further down the page, goes into detail:

"The corporeal nature of the soul has two crucial consequences for Epicureanism. First, it is the basis of Epicurus’ demonstration that the soul does not survive the death of the body (other arguments to this effect are presented in Lucretius 3.417–614). The soul’s texture is too delicate to exist independently of the body that contains it, and in any case the connection with the body is necessary for sensation to occur. From this it follows that there can be no punishment after death, nor any regrets for the life that has been lost."
-- *ibid*


Modern science seems to be very much in tune with this philosophy, and
this is a source of confidence among those who assert "death is oblivion".
So does abiogenesis and evolution, in a different way. And yet, as I said in the OP,
this confidence seems belied by the intensity with which some people here have
misrepresented me and what I stand for in so many ways over the years.
People who are confident about their beliefs should not have to resort to such methods.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

Univ. of South Carolina at Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[Lawyer Daggett]

On Tuesday, June 20, 2023 at 8:25:13 PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:

> What's this about Epicurus, you might ask. It's simple. This is about the two most popular opinions
> of Americans of what happens when one dies, and about one way it affects the behavior of all too many
> holders of one opinion or another. [Of course, the use of Epicurus's name is purely for convenience:
> hardly anyone thinks of him when pondering the mystery of death.]
>
> Epicurus gave one opinion, about which he expounded at length, confident about its truth: oblivion.
> Jesus gave the other: a life of eternal happiness, provided one satisfies certain conditions.
> His statements about heaven were very upbeat, and not at all like the cartoons
> depicting people with wings playing harps on clouds.

.
There are more beliefs in heaven and earth, Professor,
than are dreamt of or acknowledged in your dichotomy.
.
I sometimes wonder at your interpretations of others. It isn't just
that you misjudge so many, it seems that you underestimate
the wealth of diversity, complexity, and sophistication in others.
Others get packed into your little lists, often of "bad" people types.
.
I ask myself if he has simply never really spoken with many
real live humans in active bull sessions. My darker side
speculates on why people might not feel inclined to share some
things with you. It might be too late but consider reading
a few books about how to be a good listener. The great philosopher
Yogi Berra noted that you can observe a lot by watching.
You can also learn a lot by listening.

[Martin Harran]

On Tue, 20 Jun 2023 17:21:54 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
<peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:

>What's this about Epicurus, you might ask. It's simple. This is about the two most popular opinions
>of Americans of what happens when one dies, and about one way it affects the behavior of all too many holders of one opinion or another.

So, when you tell your lies, are you lying for Jesus or lying for
Epicurus?

[匽

> I suspect that a great deal of the hostility
>that all too many regulars show towards me ultimately has its roots in the way I confront them
>with a theory of Intelligent Design (ID) which dispenses with supernatural designers.

In my own case, *hostility* has nothing to do with your views about
evolution, it is a direct reaction to the way you tell lies and try to
impugn my character and that of others who disagree with you. I
obviously cannot speak for others but I get the distinct impression
that the same reasons for reaction to you applies to many others here.

[匽

[Martin Harran]

Add to that your exceptionally irritating posting style of replying to
points that are many layers deep, using threads to attack people who
are not involved in the thread and dragging in obscure arguments from
other newsgroups which most people here do not participate in.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Tuesday, June 20, 2023 at 10:30:13 PM UTC-4, Lawyer Daggett wrote:
> On Tuesday, June 20, 2023 at 8:25:13 PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:

> > What's this about Epicurus, you might ask. It's simple. This is about the two most popular opinions
> > of Americans of what happens when one dies, and about one way it affects the behavior of all too many
> > holders of one opinion or another. [Of course, the use of Epicurus's name is purely for convenience:
> > hardly anyone thinks of him when pondering the mystery of death.]
> >
> > Epicurus gave one opinion, about which he expounded at length, confident about its truth: oblivion.
> > Jesus gave the other: a life of eternal happiness, provided one satisfies certain conditions.
> > His statements about heaven were very upbeat, and not at all like the cartoons
> > depicting people with wings playing harps on clouds.
> .
> There are more beliefs in heaven and earth, Professor,
> than are dreamt of or acknowledged in your dichotomy.

I have known since childhood of the beliefs of Hindus in
reincarnation, and have learned of many beliefs of
"primitive" tribes, but the OP was quite long as it was.

That said -- what part of "the two most popular opinions of Americans"
didn't you understand?

> I sometimes wonder at your interpretations of others. It isn't just
> that you misjudge so many,

This is a canard that has never been supported.

In fact, the person most responsible for this canard
has run a perennial scam in which he claims that I am very bad
at guessing the motivations of the actions for which I am
taking him to task.

But, for the last seven years at least, and IIRC the dozen years in
which he has run this scam, he has never, *never*, NEVER
given any hint as to what his motivations were. In fact, I can't
recall an occasion on which he *explicitly* *denied* posting
things for the reasons I have claimed.

> it seems that you underestimate
> the wealth of diversity, complexity, and sophistication in others.

On the contrary, I learned within a month of first online debate that the truth of
something in a contentious dispute on Usenet may take many iterations of back-and-forth before
the arguments of one of the disputants begins to devolve into broken record routines,
personal insults, and exits punctuated with "It is impossible to argue rationally with you."

Astute, disinterested readers (but keenly interested in the truth of the matter)
will then be able, going over the whole argument, to discern whether (or not)
the last sentence requires amendment to "It is impossible for me to argue rationally with you."

You, on the other hand, never seem to have understood this.
All through the post to which I've replied, you've restricted
yourself to insults for which you haven't given a single
illustrative example, or even hinted at one. So you have
yet to initiate the process I've described.


Continued in next reply, to be done soon after I see that this one has posted.


Peter Nyikos

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Tuesday, June 20, 2023 at 10:30:13 PM UTC-4, Lawyer Daggett wrote:

In this reply, I repeat the sentence that I cut in half in my first reply.

> I sometimes wonder at your interpretations of others. It isn't just
> that you misjudge so many, it seems that you underestimate
> the wealth of diversity, complexity, and sophistication in others.

I see plenty of it in people like Öö Tiib, who ranges over a great
variety of on-topic topics. Unfortunately, there are few like him.
Burkhard, for example, is good only on topics that aren't about
science, and his ventures into philosophy of science are only
of tangential interest to the purposes for which talk.origins was set up.

You seem to be well versed in biochemistry, but you declined
an invitation from me to apply it to OOL.

> Others get packed into your little lists, often of "bad" people types.

The "little lists" are no different than the ones falsely comparing
me to people like Dr. Dr. Kleinman, JTEM, etc., except that they are accurate.

If you are talking about lists in OP's that disparage people for hypocrisy, cowardice, etc.,
Hemidactylus has seen to it since I resumed posting here in 2010
that no such lists have ever appeared in all that time. The last one
appeared no later than 2001.

In stunning contrast, I did one list in an OP titled, "A list different from
those at which Hemidactylus sneers" [not sure I recall the *exact* wording],
in which I listed 22 talk.origins regulars who (to my knowledge)
had never accused me of those shortcomings, or dishonesty,
nor had I accused any of them. I even wrote that the majority
could be described as "tough but fair," and jillery agreed with
that assessment. This was ca. 5 years ago.

The list expanded to 25 as I recalled three others, but Hemidactylus
absented himself from that thread until well after it had shifted
to completely different issues.

> I ask myself if he has simply never really spoken with many
> real live humans in active bull sessions.

You are asking a rhetorical question. I have done so since
early in high school.

You, on the other hand, are so limited in the way you talk about me
-- not just here but starting with the first
post you ever did in reply to me and never deviating --
that you give the impression that the only bull sessions
in which you actively participated were those in which
you were with a majority of the outspoken ones.


Concluded in next reply, to be done later today.


Peter Nyikos

PS In my concluding reply, I will do what neither you nor Martin Harran has done on this thread so far:
I will document an example of the kind of dishonesty I have to deal with frequently.
I will, however, refrain from identifying the guilty party: you'd have to read the post I will link
to find out, and I suspect that this is something neither you nor Martin Harran do,
where that kind of post is concerned: it might cramp your styles too much.

[*Hemidactylus*]

Why the hell are you dragging me into this? I’ve been trying to keep myself
above all this annoying interpersonal back and forth and intend on keeping
it that way.

[Mark Isaak]

On 6/20/23 5:21 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
[...]

> But now, let's look at the other side. I suspect that a great deal of the hostility
> that all too many regulars show towards me ultimately has its roots in the way I confront them
> with a theory of Intelligent Design (ID) which dispenses with supernatural designers.

Speaking only for myself, I find that you are usually at your best in
posts where you are describing such ideas. What mainly inspires
feelings of hostility in me are the instances where you behave hostilely
towards others (including, but not limited to, myself), often without
any hint of a proximate cause.

Your tendency to digress is also irritating, as is your habit of
breaking up the posts you are responding to into little pieces, even
breaking sentences. These do not in themselves inspire hostility, but
they sometimes start a downward spiral to mutual blows.

Finally, there is your lack of understanding of others' motives. Your
paragraph above is an example. Several people have commented on your
frequent lack of recognition of sarcasm and subtle humor. Do you
understand that you are not as skilled as others in these areas? If so,
you should also conclude that you are not skilled in recognizing other
people's motives. I submit that your life will be happier if you assume
the most charitable possible motives to others, instead of skipping
directly to hostility.

--
Mark Isaak
"Wisdom begins when you discover the difference between 'That
doesn't make sense' and 'I don't understand.'" - Mary Doria Russell

[Kalkidas]

On 6/20/2023 5:21 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> What's this about Epicurus, you might ask. It's simple. This is about the two most popular opinions
> of Americans of what happens when one dies, and about one way it affects the behavior of all too many
> holders of one opinion or another. [Of course, the use of Epicurus's name is purely for convenience:
> hardly anyone thinks of him when pondering the mystery of death.]
>
> Epicurus gave one opinion, about which he expounded at length, confident about its truth: oblivion.
> Jesus gave the other: a life of eternal happiness, provided one satisfies certain conditions.
> His statements about heaven were very upbeat, and not at all like the cartoons
> depicting people with wings playing harps on clouds.
>
> Many of those who confidently hold one or the other of these opinions are nevertheless insecure
> on some deep level. This was brought home to me in the following article,
> which expounds very articulately about the ways creationists "lie for Jesus."

No one can conceive of "oblivion", or "the annihilation of the
individual". It is not an idea that can be held in the consciousness.
This should be a glaringly obvious substantiation of the fact that no
conscious entity can cease to be. They are all eternal individuals
without beginning or end.

The problem is that the "oblivion" crowd consists of individuals (like
Epicurus) who are thoroughly dedicated to enjoying the pleasures of the
body, and they completely identify with the body, which they know will
cease to exist. Their addiction to sensual pleasure, and their fear of
being without it when the senses die along with the body, causes them so
much terror that they concoct the "when I die I will cease to be
altogether" philosophy.

This is the rationalized cowardice of fools. No wise man accepts such
nonsense for a second.

Jesus Christ is right. Epicurus is wrong.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, June 21, 2023 at 10:30:15 AM UTC-4, *Hemidactylus* wrote:
> peter2...@gmail.com <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Tuesday, June 20, 2023 at 10:30:13 PM UTC-4, Lawyer Daggett wrote:
> >
> >
> > In this reply, I repeat the sentence that I cut in half in my first reply.
> >
> >> I sometimes wonder at your interpretations of others. It isn't just
> >> that you misjudge so many, it seems that you underestimate
> >> the wealth of diversity, complexity, and sophistication in others.

In re what goes on between us below, Hemidactylus:
I was doing my best to avoid negative personal comments in my
response to the above allegation:

I'm sorry, I got carried away by Daggett's mention of alleged "lists,"
and thinking I needed to say something that he could not argue against.


If I had thought more about it, I would have instead gone all the way back to 1995,
when Paul Gans inaugurated a strategy that has been unceasingly
followed ever since then.

And that is to never, *never*, NEVER try to show that the explicit
criteria for being on the lists were NOT applicable to them,
but instead to crow about what an "honor" it is to be included
on such a list by me.

He even begged and pleaded with me to put him on the "Bandar-log" list,
and I kept telling him why the things he was saying did not qualify.
Finally, about a month after he stopped doing this, I had gathered
enough evidence on him, and then he "rejoiced" over having been included.


Anyway, I'll be careful to leave you out of any personal back and forth
on this thread from now on. That's all that has gone on in this thread between me
and the two who preceded you, with me making the only positive comments about
any specific person [see above].


Peter Nyikos

[Martin Harran]

On Wed, 21 Jun 2023 06:10:48 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
<peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:

>On Tuesday, June 20, 2023 at 10:30:13?PM UTC-4, Lawyer Daggett wrote:

[匽

>All through the post to which I've replied, you've restricted
>yourself to insults for which you haven't given a single
>illustrative example, or even hinted at one. So you have
>yet to initiate the process I've described.

So speaks he who said he would produce examples of my lack o0r respect
for the teaching of Jesus - twelve weeks have elapsed and you haven't
produced a single example.

[匽

[Martin Harran]

In the 'It's not just elephants who never forget' category:

[*Hemidactylus*]

Gans had passed a while back so, despite bad blood between you, should be
left out of it.

>
> And that is to never, *never*, NEVER try to show that the explicit
> criteria for being on the lists were NOT applicable to them,
> but instead to crow about what an "honor" it is to be included
> on such a list by me.
>
> He even begged and pleaded with me to put him on the "Bandar-log" list,
> and I kept telling him why the things he was saying did not qualify.
> Finally, about a month after he stopped doing this, I had gathered
> enough evidence on him, and then he "rejoiced" over having been included.
>
>
> Anyway, I'll be careful to leave you out of any personal back and forth
> on this thread from now on. That's all that has gone on in this thread between me
> and the two who preceded you, with me making the only positive comments about
> any specific person [see above].
>

I’m trying not to get sucked into these negative vortices any more. Thanks.

[*Hemidactylus*]

IMO Gans should not be included in a Chez Watt.

[Martin Harran]

I didn't realise he had passed. I only vaguely remember him but from
what I do remember, I don't think he would have minded.

[André G. Isaak]

On 2023-06-21 08:56, Kalkidas wrote:

> No one can conceive of "oblivion", or "the annihilation of the
> individual". It is not an idea that can be held in the consciousness.
> This should be a glaringly obvious substantiation of the fact that no
> conscious entity can cease to be. They are all eternal individuals
> without beginning or end.

If this was actually 'glaringly obvious', then no one would disagree
with it. I suggest it is not nearly as obvious as you believe.

>
> The problem is that the "oblivion" crowd consists of individuals (like
> Epicurus) who are thoroughly dedicated to enjoying the pleasures of the
> body, and they completely identify with the body, which they know will
> cease to exist. Their addiction to sensual pleasure, and their fear of
> being without it when the senses die along with the body, causes them so
> much terror that they concoct the "when I die I will cease to be
> altogether" philosophy.
>
> This is the rationalized cowardice of fools. No wise man accepts such
> nonsense for a second.
>
> Jesus Christ is right. Epicurus is wrong.

You might want to learn a bit about what Epikouros *actually* believed.
The 'oblivion' part is largely correct. The 'pleasures of the body' part
not so much.

André

--
To email remove 'invalid' & replace 'gm' with well known Google mail
service.

[Kalkidas]

On 6/21/2023 3:38 PM, André G. Isaak wrote:
> On 2023-06-21 08:56, Kalkidas wrote:
>
>> No one can conceive of "oblivion", or "the annihilation of the
>> individual". It is not an idea that can be held in the consciousness.
>> This should be a glaringly obvious substantiation of the fact that no
>> conscious entity can cease to be. They are all eternal individuals
>> without beginning or end.
>
> If this was actually 'glaringly obvious', then no one would disagree
> with it. I suggest it is not nearly as obvious as you believe.

It is not true that something glaringly obvious is never disagreed with.
I cite the O.J. Simpson murder case as just one example.

>
>>
>> The problem is that the "oblivion" crowd consists of individuals (like
>> Epicurus) who are thoroughly dedicated to enjoying the pleasures of
>> the body, and they completely identify with the body, which they know
>> will cease to exist. Their addiction to sensual pleasure, and their
>> fear of being without it when the senses die along with the body,
>> causes them so much terror that they concoct the "when I die I will
>> cease to be altogether" philosophy.
>>
>> This is the rationalized cowardice of fools. No wise man accepts such
>> nonsense for a second.
>>
>> Jesus Christ is right. Epicurus is wrong.
>
> You might want to learn a bit about what Epikouros *actually* believed.
> The 'oblivion' part is largely correct. The 'pleasures of the body' part
> not so much.

Hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure as the highest value and only goal of
life. And since he was a materialist, pleasure meant bodily pleasure,
since by his philosophy there was nothing more to a human being than the
body.

[broger...@gmail.com]

.......

> Hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure as the highest value and only goal of
> life. And since he was a materialist, pleasure meant bodily pleasure,
> since by his philosophy there was nothing more to a human being than the
> body.

Maybe you should read what he actually wrote.

For example....

"When we say ... that pleasure is the end and aim, we do not mean the pleasures of the prodigal or the pleasures of sensuality, as we are understood to do by some through ignorance, prejudice or wilful misrepresentation. By pleasure we mean the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul. It is not by an unbroken succession of drinking bouts and of revelry, not by sexual lust, nor the enjoyment of fish and other delicacies of a luxurious table, which produce a pleasant life; it is sober reasoning, searching out the grounds of every choice and avoidance, and banishing those beliefs through which the greatest tumults take possession of the soul."
— Epicurus, "Letter to Menoeceus"

Here's a bit more...

https://philosophybreak.com/articles/epicurus-principal-doctrines-40-aphorisms-for-living-well/

Or you could try the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epicurus/

Or if that's too dense for your taste, there's always Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicureanism

In any case, Epicurus was not the stereotypical hedonist you seem to think. You're not alone in your error - most people who have not read Epicurus (or his fan, Lucretius) also think that Epicureanism = sensual hedonism. It doesn't.

[jillery]

On Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:31:52 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
<peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:

>On Wednesday, June 21, 2023 at 10:30:15?AM UTC-4, *Hemidactylus* wrote:
>> peter2...@gmail.com <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:

The above illustrates how T.O. is a microcosm of the world at large,
as illustrated below:

<https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/chaos-erupts-in-house-after-adam-schiff-is-censured-shame-shame-shame/ar-AA1cRwug?ocid=hpmsn&cvid=5eb993c311cd4e5daaa8ca561c70f2ee&ei=11>
<https://tinyurl.com/yw6s99ud>
**************************************
Chaos ERUPTS in House After Adam Schiff Is Censured: ‘Shame! Shame!
Shame!’
****************************************


--
You're entitled to your own opinions.
You're not entitled to your own facts.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Tuesday, June 20, 2023 at 10:30:13 PM UTC-4, Lawyer Daggett wrote:

> On Tuesday, June 20, 2023 at 8:25:13 PM UTC-4, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:

This is my third and final reply to a post by Lawyer Daggett, picking up where the second left off.

> My darker side
> speculates on why people might not feel inclined to share some
> things with you.

I can only think of two kinds of "things" of which you speak,
since you are so tight-lipped about them:

1. Personal anecdotes of things not known up to that time in talk.origins.
The source of the canard I described in my first reply has repeatedly told me that
nobody is interested in such things where I am concerned.

2. Rebuttals of accusations of mine, especially those in which
the would-be refuter was caught red-handed in hypocrisy, dishonesty, etc.

One well-known regular tried to claim that such things were
commonly done, but fell silent as I told him this was very rare,
and recalled two posts for him from which he had run away.

In both, I caught him red-handed lying about me. The first was
linked in the second, which in turn I've linked here:

https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/qHuni8UqsRA/m/UZKEqq5_AwAJ
Re: The Silurian hypothesis:
May 3, 2023, 10:00:10 PM


If you, Daggett were (unexpectedly!) to read this post, you
will see that I expected him to run away
from it, like he did from the first one, and
he fulfilled this expectation. This "prediction" was in direct
response to the following garbage from him:

"And now there will be an endless series of back and forth attacks
resulting from this irrelevant seed."

> It might be too late but consider reading
> a few books about how to be a good listener. The great philosopher
> Yogi Berra noted that you can observe a lot by watching.
> You can also learn a lot by listening.

This hypocritical comment could apply with far more justice to any of
a number of regulars here, including the one I caught
red-handed as described above.

Also anyone who has killfiled me and likes to talk about OOL.
On another thread, I talked just now about two people
who can no longer argue effectively for OOL because they
are willfully ignorant of how mysterious things are above
the first two floors of the metaphorical 100 foot skyscraper
whose roof represents the first free-living prokaryote.


Peter Nyikos

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, June 21, 2023 at 6:40:14 PM UTC-4, André G. Isaak wrote:
> On 2023-06-21 08:56, Kalkidas wrote:
>
> > No one can conceive of "oblivion", or "the annihilation of the
> > individual". It is not an idea that can be held in the consciousness.
> > This should be a glaringly obvious substantiation of the fact that no
> > conscious entity can cease to be. They are all eternal individuals
> > without beginning or end.

> If this was actually 'glaringly obvious', then no one would disagree
> with it. I suggest it is not nearly as obvious as you believe.

Indeed, while it cannot be "held in the consciousness,"
it can be reasoned about and even conceived indirectly.
Edward Fitzgerald said it poetically:

And if the Wine you drink, the Lip you press
End in what All begins and ends in — Yes;
Think then you are TODAY what YESTERDAY
You were — TO-MORROW you shall not be less.
-- the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, v. 43 in the edition used by Wordpress.com

One can read "TOMORROW" as the result of death; it's suggested by "All".
Similarly, YESTERDAY can mean the time before one's conception.

> >
> > The problem is that the "oblivion" crowd consists of individuals (like
> > Epicurus) who are thoroughly dedicated to enjoying the pleasures of the
> > body, and they completely identify with the body, which they know will
> > cease to exist. Their addiction to sensual pleasure, and their fear of
> > being without it when the senses die along with the body, causes them so
> > much terror that they concoct the "when I die I will cease to be
> > altogether" philosophy.
> >
> > This is the rationalized cowardice of fools. No wise man accepts such
> > nonsense for a second.
> >
> > Jesus Christ is right. Epicurus is wrong.
> You might want to learn a bit about what Epikouros *actually* believed.
> The 'oblivion' part is largely correct. The 'pleasures of the body' part
> not so much.
>
> André

Its good to see you posting here, André. I haven't seen much of you lately.


Peter Nyikos

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, June 21, 2023 at 11:00:14 AM UTC-4, Kalkidas wrote:
> On 6/20/2023 5:21 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > What's this about Epicurus, you might ask. It's simple. This is about the two most popular opinions
> > of Americans of what happens when one dies, and about one way it affects the behavior of all too many
> > holders of one opinion or another. [Of course, the use of Epicurus's name is purely for convenience:
> > hardly anyone thinks of him when pondering the mystery of death.]
> >
> > Epicurus gave one opinion, about which he expounded at length, confident about its truth: oblivion.
> > Jesus gave the other: a life of eternal happiness, provided one satisfies certain conditions.
> > His statements about heaven were very upbeat, and not at all like the cartoons
> > depicting people with wings playing harps on clouds.
> >
> > Many of those who confidently hold one or the other of these opinions are nevertheless insecure
> > on some deep level. This was brought home to me in the following article,
> > which expounds very articulately about the ways creationists "lie for Jesus."

> No one can conceive of "oblivion", or "the annihilation of the
> individual". It is not an idea that can be held in the consciousness.
> This should be a glaringly obvious substantiation of the fact that no
> conscious entity can cease to be. They are all eternal individuals
> without beginning or end.

"Without beginning" is the doctrine of Hinduism. It is not a part of the Christian world view,
which views history as a progression, not the cyclic view of history that is in most
religions, including most primitive ones, according to Mircea Eliade.

Have you ever read Eliade's introduction to this issue?
It is "Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return."
It is a fairly short and very profound, professionally written book.
With my background (and probably yours), it is quite readable,
though demanding careful attention.

Anyway, it is a dogma of the Catholic Church that the individual
human soul is created by God, although the moment of its creation
is not a part of the doctrine. It used to be, when ignorance of human
bodily beginnings was universal, that the Catholic belief was that it was
delayed for a number of weeks. Now a widespread belief is that
it happens at the moment the sperm penetrates the oocyte
and renders the zona pellucida impervious to further penetration.


And now for the bottom line: once one conceives of a beginning to
a conscious individual, one can apply the same reasoning to its end.
I told André G. Isaak [no relation to Mark Isaak, by the way] about
the way this is done poetically in "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam."


Your theme shifted abruptly here, and I'll save that for my next
post, after I've taken care of a number of things. I expect that
to be over in a couple of hours.


By the way, I'll be taking a two week posting break beginning
this weekend. I hope you will still be around when I resume posting.


Peter Nyikos

[Kalkidas]

Everything I wrote is accurate.

Merriam-Webster: "Hedonism: the doctrine that pleasure or happiness is
the sole or chief good in life"

Wikipedia: "Epicurus was a hedonist, meaning he taught that what is
pleasurable is morally good and what is painful is morally evil... He
idiosyncratically defined "pleasure" as the absence of suffering... and
taught that all humans should seek to attain the state of ataraxia,
meaning "untroubledness", a state in which the person is completely free
from all pain or suffering."

Now, pain and suffering exist where? In the senses of the body.
Therefore, Epicurus' philosophy is literally "sensual hedonism", i.e.
bodily pleasure.

I think his problem was his "idiosyncratic" definition of pleasure. This
enabled him to avoid being called a libertine (i.e. a "stereotypical
hedonist"). Nevertheless his philosophy is obviously centered on the
body and the bodily senses.

[Kalkidas]

On 6/22/2023 6:45 AM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Wednesday, June 21, 2023 at 11:00:14 AM UTC-4, Kalkidas wrote:
>> On 6/20/2023 5:21 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>>> What's this about Epicurus, you might ask. It's simple. This is about the two most popular opinions
>>> of Americans of what happens when one dies, and about one way it affects the behavior of all too many
>>> holders of one opinion or another. [Of course, the use of Epicurus's name is purely for convenience:
>>> hardly anyone thinks of him when pondering the mystery of death.]
>>>
>>> Epicurus gave one opinion, about which he expounded at length, confident about its truth: oblivion.
>>> Jesus gave the other: a life of eternal happiness, provided one satisfies certain conditions.
>>> His statements about heaven were very upbeat, and not at all like the cartoons
>>> depicting people with wings playing harps on clouds.
>>>
>>> Many of those who confidently hold one or the other of these opinions are nevertheless insecure
>>> on some deep level. This was brought home to me in the following article,
>>> which expounds very articulately about the ways creationists "lie for Jesus."
>
>> No one can conceive of "oblivion", or "the annihilation of the
>> individual". It is not an idea that can be held in the consciousness.
>> This should be a glaringly obvious substantiation of the fact that no
>> conscious entity can cease to be. They are all eternal individuals
>> without beginning or end.
>
> "Without beginning" is the doctrine of Hinduism. It is not a part of the Christian world view,
> which views history as a progression, not the cyclic view of history that is in most
> religions, including most primitive ones, according to Mircea Eliade.

I am a Christian, and it is part of my worldview. I consider the
eternality of the soul to be revealed truth. And it also passes the test
of reasonableness.

>
> Have you ever read Eliade's introduction to this issue?
> It is "Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return."
> It is a fairly short and very profound, professionally written book.
> With my background (and probably yours), it is quite readable,
> though demanding careful attention.
>
> Anyway, it is a dogma of the Catholic Church that the individual
> human soul is created by God, although the moment of its creation
> is not a part of the doctrine. It used to be, when ignorance of human
> bodily beginnings was universal, that the Catholic belief was that it was
> delayed for a number of weeks. Now a widespread belief is that
> it happens at the moment the sperm penetrates the oocyte
> and renders the zona pellucida impervious to further penetration.

I do not consider the official doctrines of the Catholic church, or any
other Christian denomination, or indeed any religious institution, to be
infallible.

>
> And now for the bottom line: once one conceives of a beginning to
> a conscious individual, one can apply the same reasoning to its end.
> I told André G. Isaak [no relation to Mark Isaak, by the way] about
> the way this is done poetically in "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam."

And once one conceives of a conscious individual *without* beginning,
then one can apply the same reasoning to it being without end.

[Mark Isaak]

Anyone who has ever fallen asleep has firsthand experience with a
cessation of consciousness. Many of those are able to extrapolate from
that experience and hold ideas about it.

[broger...@gmail.com]

.....

> Everything I wrote is accurate.

Not really. But I'm not trying to convince you, just giving some links to what Epicurus actually said, so that others will not make the same mistake you do.

>
> Merriam-Webster: "Hedonism: the doctrine that pleasure or happiness is
> the sole or chief good in life"
>
> Wikipedia: "Epicurus was a hedonist, meaning he taught that what is
> pleasurable is morally good and what is painful is morally evil... He
> idiosyncratically defined "pleasure" as the absence of suffering... and
> taught that all humans should seek to attain the state of ataraxia,
> meaning "untroubledness", a state in which the person is completely free
> from all pain or suffering."
>
> Now, pain and suffering exist where? In the senses of the body.
> Therefore, Epicurus' philosophy is literally "sensual hedonism", i.e.
> bodily pleasure.

In the quote I gave you from Epicurus' Letter to Menoeceus, Epicurus explicitly refers to "trouble in the soul," he restricts neither pleasures nor pains to those of the body.

>
> I think his problem was his "idiosyncratic" definition of pleasure. This
> enabled him to avoid being called a libertine (i.e. a "stereotypical
> hedonist"). Nevertheless his philosophy is obviously centered on the
> body and the bodily senses.

You still have not bothered to read what he wrote. That's OK. Maybe others will do so.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, June 21, 2023 at 11:00:14 AM UTC-4, Kalkidas wrote:

> On 6/20/2023 5:21 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:

> > Epicurus gave one opinion, about which he expounded at length, confident about its truth: oblivion.
> > Jesus gave the other: a life of eternal happiness, provided one satisfies certain conditions.
> > His statements about heaven were very upbeat, and not at all like the cartoons
> > depicting people with wings playing harps on clouds.
> >
> > Many of those who confidently hold one or the other of these opinions are nevertheless insecure
> > on some deep level.

<snip to get to where I left off in my first reply>

> The problem is that the "oblivion" crowd consists of individuals (like
> Epicurus) who are thoroughly dedicated to enjoying the pleasures of the
> body,

You've been corrected on this where Epicurus is concerned.
At best, you should have depicted him as "enjoying some
of the pleasures of the body." I've read, for example, that one
of his chief pleasures was drinking water. Part of what made it pleasurable
was cognition: the knowledge of how dependent all life is on water.

The word "epicure" has done Epicurus a great disservice, by making him
seem like a connoisseur of all kinds of fine foods and drinks.

That said, what you say above and below may well apply to
the majority of talk.origins regulars. That depends, though on what
you mean by the "oblivion crowd." Few here are outspoken about
believing that death is oblivion, although I think most are very
hopeful that this is the case: the conditions that many think
are demanded [perhaps mistakenly] for heavenly bliss or reincarnation
into something better than their present existence are too onerous.

One of the most outspoken ones is John Harshman, who has claimed
that God, and a life after death, are fairy tales that mature adults
need to grow out of. Not far behind is jillery, who puts the Judeo-Christian-Islamic
beliefs in God on the same level as Pastsafarianism, the organization whose
"icon" is the flying spaghetti monster.

On the other hand, both of them are extremely tight-lipped about the
kind of "sensual pleasure" they pursue. However, one can suspect
the direction jillery's take from the way she has sneered at my
avoidance of obscene language, and from her chosen email address:

69jpil69@...

The jpil part stands for a moniker jillery has used away from talk.origins: Jill Pillory.
Very apt, when considering jillery's behavior towards me (and you?).

> and they completely identify with the body, which they know will
> cease to exist. Their addiction to sensual pleasure, and their fear of
> being without it when the senses die along with the body, causes them so
> much terror that they concoct the "when I die I will cease to be
> altogether" philosophy.

I'll go along with this to the following extent: I think this philosophy
is just as much wishful thinking as an unexamined belief in
"pie in the sky, by and by."

>
> This is the rationalized cowardice of fools. No wise man accepts such
> nonsense for a second.

No, I don't go that far. But the behavior of jillery
may well be describable that way, inasmuch as she even
*defined* dark matter as having ONLY gravitational properties.

No wise man would accept such nonsense. It betokens a
fear that dark matter is made up of matter that has properties
as diverse as electrical and magnetic attraction and repulsion
between objects, and chemical reactions that are internal
rather than exerting that kind of influence on our kind of matter.
Conversely, any beings made of dark matter might be oblivious
to ordinary matter except by ITS gravitational force.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

Univ. of South Carolina at Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[peter2...@gmail.com]

I undermined this in my first reply to this post of Kalkidas,
and he softened this attitude in reply.

> Anyone who has ever fallen asleep has firsthand experience with a
> cessation of consciousness. Many of those are able to extrapolate from
> that experience and hold ideas about it.

The problem here is that this might be simply a lapse of memory
of falling asleep, rather than the cessation of all sensations when
it took place.

A more striking example is general anesthesia. When I regained
consciousness from each time I had it, it was as though no time
at all had elapsed since the last sensation I had and the "waking up."

My first such experience was when, aged 5, I was given ether for a hernia
operation. During it, I momentarily regained consciousness with my eyes
closed and a bright light shining on the lids. It was as if no time
had passed since the ether mask was on my face and the
speech of the people in the room seemed to turn into unintelligible noise.

I gave a cry of distress, and the next thing I knew, I was back in my private hospital room.

Strange thing, though: my father, who was watching the operation, related how
I had complained about the things on my abdomen while the operation was going
on, and tried to remove them. Of that, I had no recollection on waking up.


Peter Nyikos

[Kalkidas]

Yes, really. And you haven't said what my alleged "mistake" is. I'm just
reasoning from Epicurus' first principles: atomistic materialism and
oblivionism.

>>
>> Merriam-Webster: "Hedonism: the doctrine that pleasure or happiness is
>> the sole or chief good in life"
>>
>> Wikipedia: "Epicurus was a hedonist, meaning he taught that what is
>> pleasurable is morally good and what is painful is morally evil... He
>> idiosyncratically defined "pleasure" as the absence of suffering... and
>> taught that all humans should seek to attain the state of ataraxia,
>> meaning "untroubledness", a state in which the person is completely free
>> from all pain or suffering."
>>
>> Now, pain and suffering exist where? In the senses of the body.
>> Therefore, Epicurus' philosophy is literally "sensual hedonism", i.e.
>> bodily pleasure.
>
> In the quote I gave you from Epicurus' Letter to Menoeceus, Epicurus explicitly refers to "trouble in the soul," he restricts neither pleasures nor pains to those of the body.

But atomistic materialism necessitates that the soul is a mere
collection of atoms just like the body. So yet again, Epicurus, ignoring
standard ideas of the soul as a non-material conscious spiritual entity,
has idiosyncratically defined "soul" for his own purposes. Indeed, the
soul of Epicurus is just another body.

>>
>> I think his problem was his "idiosyncratic" definition of pleasure. This
>> enabled him to avoid being called a libertine (i.e. a "stereotypical
>> hedonist"). Nevertheless his philosophy is obviously centered on the
>> body and the bodily senses.
>
> You still have not bothered to read what he wrote. That's OK. Maybe others will do so.
>

I really don't think I'm the lazy one here....

[broger...@gmail.com]

You are reasoning from what you think are Epicurus's first principles and coming to different conclusions than he himself did in his own writings. That should tell you that you've either got his first principles wrong, or are reasoning incorrectly.

> >>
> >> Merriam-Webster: "Hedonism: the doctrine that pleasure or happiness is
> >> the sole or chief good in life"
> >>
> >> Wikipedia: "Epicurus was a hedonist, meaning he taught that what is
> >> pleasurable is morally good and what is painful is morally evil... He
> >> idiosyncratically defined "pleasure" as the absence of suffering... and
> >> taught that all humans should seek to attain the state of ataraxia,
> >> meaning "untroubledness", a state in which the person is completely free
> >> from all pain or suffering."
> >>
> >> Now, pain and suffering exist where? In the senses of the body.
> >> Therefore, Epicurus' philosophy is literally "sensual hedonism", i.e.
> >> bodily pleasure.
> >
> > In the quote I gave you from Epicurus' Letter to Menoeceus, Epicurus explicitly refers to "trouble in the soul," he restricts neither pleasures nor pains to those of the body.
> But atomistic materialism necessitates that the soul is a mere
> collection of atoms just like the body. So yet again, Epicurus, ignoring
> standard ideas of the soul as a non-material conscious spiritual entity,
> has idiosyncratically defined "soul" for his own purposes. Indeed, the
> soul of Epicurus is just another body.

You are reading Cartesian dualism into a philosopher who worked a couple of thousand years before such dualism became a "standard idea."

[Kalkidas]

No. It is Epicurus whose reasoning is wrong. That is the point.

>>>> Merriam-Webster: "Hedonism: the doctrine that pleasure or happiness is
>>>> the sole or chief good in life"
>>>>
>>>> Wikipedia: "Epicurus was a hedonist, meaning he taught that what is
>>>> pleasurable is morally good and what is painful is morally evil... He
>>>> idiosyncratically defined "pleasure" as the absence of suffering... and
>>>> taught that all humans should seek to attain the state of ataraxia,
>>>> meaning "untroubledness", a state in which the person is completely free
>>>> from all pain or suffering."
>>>>
>>>> Now, pain and suffering exist where? In the senses of the body.
>>>> Therefore, Epicurus' philosophy is literally "sensual hedonism", i.e.
>>>> bodily pleasure.
>>>
>>> In the quote I gave you from Epicurus' Letter to Menoeceus, Epicurus explicitly refers to "trouble in the soul," he restricts neither pleasures nor pains to those of the body.
>> But atomistic materialism necessitates that the soul is a mere
>> collection of atoms just like the body. So yet again, Epicurus, ignoring
>> standard ideas of the soul as a non-material conscious spiritual entity,
>> has idiosyncratically defined "soul" for his own purposes. Indeed, the
>> soul of Epicurus is just another body.
>
> You are reading Cartesian dualism into a philosopher who worked a couple of thousand years before such dualism became a "standard idea."

That's rich. I have not even remotely suggested "Cartesian dualism".

[broger...@gmail.com]

Sure you have - "Standard ideas of the soul as a non-material conscious, spiritual entity" is straight up Cartesian dualism. Greeks, Romans, and even early Christians (with the exception of some Gnostics, generally treated as heretics) did not have a clear conception of the soul as non-material. Even into the Middle Ages, there were Christians who thought that that the soul had material weight, and that the weight of a person would decrease at the moment of death by exactly the weight of the soul.

If you want to argue against sensual hedonism, by all means go for it. Just don't think that in doing so you are arguing against the philosophy of Epicurus.

[Kalkidas]

The key point you're missing is that in "Cartesian dualism" there is no
causal relationship from res cogitans to res extensa. I have not
proposed Cartesian dualism.

I guess it's my turn to recommend that you actually read something.

>
> If you want to argue against sensual hedonism, by all means go for it. Just don't think that in doing so you are arguing against the philosophy of Epicurus.

I am arguing against it. What I wrote is accurate.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

Bill Rogers has the standard Western idea of what soul is all about.
Worse yet, he follows the typical atheistic notion of
Descartes's "mind" as "the ghost in the machine,", the better to dismiss the whole
idea of dualism.

As you probably know, the Chandogya Upanishad already has a powerful dialogue
on the nature of the soul as being something over and above
the body. But popularizations of philosophy for modern readers,
like _Philosophy_Made_Simple_ [yes, there was a book with that title!]
never mention it in connection with the mind-body problem;
nor do books that purport to settle it, like the vastly over-rated [1]
book by Gilbert Ryle _The_Concept_of_Mind_ .

Nor do such sources mention Ezekiel 37 : 7-10, describing the vision
of the dry bones coming to life. [2]

And it is rare to find an intelligent discussion of Plato's "Phaedo," with
the concept of the soul as expounded on by Socrates. [3]


[1] Nowhere does the book emphasize that the seat of consciousness (mind)
is the brain! Yet William James was already very sophisticated about that.
The Wikipedia treatment of that book is an absolutely travesty.

[2] 7 So I prophesied as I was commanded. And as I was prophesying, there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone. 8 I looked, and tendons and flesh appeared on them and skin covered them, but there was no breath in them.

9 Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and say to it, ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Come, breath, from the four winds and breathe into these slain, that they may live.’” 10 So I prophesied as he commanded me, and breath entered them; they came to life and stood up on their feet—a vast army.
--https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ezekiel%2037&version=NIV

[3] There is plenty of incentive for secular expositors of philosophy to avoid
an ancient Greek dialogue where the soul is described (by Socrates) as surviving
death completely independently of the body. Socrates spends a lot of time
arguing against Simmias's "modern" concept of the soul being "the harmony of the body."


You really need to hit Bill Rogers with these kinds of references, especially the last,
with his parroting of the standard atheism-serving claim,

"Greeks, Romans, and even early Christians ... did not have a clear conception of the soul as non-material."

You see, Bill has had me killfiled for at least three years now,
and will not see anything I've written until you make him see it
by quoting it to him, or at least leaving it in your replies to posts like this one.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

Univ. of South Carolina in Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Thursday, June 22, 2023 at 8:10:15 PM UTC-4, Kalkidas wrote:
> On 6/22/2023 3:20 PM, broger...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Thursday, June 22, 2023 at 6:10:15 PM UTC-4, Kalkidas wrote:
> >> On 6/22/2023 11:43 AM, broger...@gmail.com wrote:
> >>> On Thursday, June 22, 2023 at 1:35:16 PM UTC-4, Kalkidas wrote:

> >>>> Now, pain and suffering exist where? In the senses of the body.
> >>>> Therefore, Epicurus' philosophy is literally "sensual hedonism", i.e.
> >>>> bodily pleasure.
> >>>
> >>> In the quote I gave you from Epicurus' Letter to Menoeceus, Epicurus explicitly refers to "trouble in the soul," he restricts neither pleasures nor pains to those of the body.

> >> But atomistic materialism necessitates that the soul is a mere
> >> collection of atoms just like the body. So yet again, Epicurus, ignoring
> >> standard ideas of the soul as a non-material conscious spiritual entity,
> >> has idiosyncratically defined "soul" for his own purposes. Indeed, the
> >> soul of Epicurus is just another body.

Our understanding of the universe has progressed to the point where
this may be a false dichotomy. People who dare to suggest the following
possibility are likely to be misrepresented as believing it and therefore
being cranks and kooks, but I've learned to live with misrepresentations
like this, and so I state it here.

Might the seat of our consciousness be dark matter pervading our
bodies, the way Epicurus thought it lay in special atoms pervading
our bodies? That would be a modern "third way" between Epicurus
and the materialistic claim that our bodies, made just of the
familiar old atoms, are responsible for our conscious selves.

> >>> You are reading Cartesian dualism into a philosopher who worked a couple of thousand years before such dualism became a "standard idea."

> >> That's rich. I have not even remotely suggested "Cartesian dualism".
> >
> > Sure you have - "Standard ideas of the soul as a non-material conscious, spiritual entity" is straight up Cartesian dualism.

Actually, Descartes generally avoided the word "soul," and tried to argue from first principles for
the nature of the "mind" as being identical with the conscious ("thinking") self. By the way, the word "self"
is used in the standard translations of the Chandogya Upanishad for the word "atman." It parts
company with Christian views of the soul by its apparent support at the end for the dogma that "atman is Brahman."

> >Greeks, Romans, and even early Christians (with the exception of some Gnostics, generally treated as heretics) did not have a clear conception of the soul as non-material. Even into the Middle Ages, there were Christians who thought that that the soul had material weight, and that the weight of a person would decrease at the moment of death by exactly the weight of the soul.

Even in the 20th century, there were experiments which were claimed to show this.
Dying people were placed in special beds whose weight
was monitored, and there was a change of about one gram at a
specific moment, which seemed to mark the point of death.
The obvious interpretation that this was exhaled air was carefully countered
in the reports of this data.

The "kooky" idea of the soul being made of dark matter would handily explain this.
Dark matter, besides exerting gravitational influence on ordinary matter,
also should be influenced gravitationally by planets, etc. By leaving
the body at the point of death, it would no longer register its own
earth-imposed weight on the scale.

Jillery's desperate act of *defining* dark matter as having ONLY gravitational
properties may have been due to her getting wind of such ideas.


And now I come to what you added this time around:

> The key point you're missing is that in "Cartesian dualism" there is no
> causal relationship from res cogitans to res extensa. I have not
> proposed Cartesian dualism.

You are describing epiphenomenalism, not Cartesian dualism,
which is a philosophy of mind-body interactionism.

Another form of dualism is mind-body parallelism,
expounded in different forms by Malebranche and Leibnitz, but NOT Descartes.
Bill obviously did not read enough philosophy to learn about all this.

> I guess it's my turn to recommend that you actually read something.

Looks like you BOTH need to do some reading.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics

Univ. of South Carolina -- standard disclaimer--
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[John Harshman]

On 6/22/23 7:07 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> Might the seat of our consciousness be dark matter pervading our
> bodies, the way Epicurus thought it lay in special atoms pervading
> our bodies? That would be a modern "third way" between Epicurus
> and the materialistic claim that our bodies, made just of the
> familiar old atoms, are responsible for our conscious selves.

If we understand anything whatsoever about dark matter, that isn't
possible. It interacts with normal matter only gravitationally, so there
would be nothing keeping it tethered to your body. On the other hand, if
we understand nothing about dark matter, it's just an empty buzzword
that sounds sciency but means nothing. Pick one.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Friday, June 23, 2023 at 12:40:16 AM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
> On 6/22/23 7:07 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:

You left out the cautionary words that preceded the following
highly speculative paragraph that one sees next:

> > Might the seat of our consciousness be dark matter pervading our
> > bodies, the way Epicurus thought it lay in special atoms pervading
> > our bodies? That would be a modern "third way" between Epicurus
> > and the materialistic claim that our bodies, made just of the
> > familiar old atoms, are responsible for our conscious selves.

> If we understand anything whatsoever about dark matter, that isn't
> possible. It interacts with normal matter only gravitationally,

Have you read the Wikipedia entry on dark matter?
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter

Your confident opening sentence is very far from being
adequately supported there, and the second sentence doesn't
do justice to what astronomers know; I'd start with:

"There has been overwhelming evidence for at least two decades that there
is an unknown form of matter that has profound gravitational effects on galaxies."

The experiments for detecting non-gravitational properties that
one reads about at length in the Wikipedia entry are very far removed from
an examination of human nerve impulses.

You need to keep in mind the wild card of quantum indeterminacy.
This is the modern day analogue of Epicurus's idea that the
(hypothetical) atoms that comprise the soul have a "swerve"
that makes free will actions possible. I haven't heard of any
experiments to estimate the probabilities of this or that neuronal
action following a probability density curve different from what
is seen in inanimate settings, have you?

> so there would be nothing keeping it tethered to your body.

The ways of studying dark matter heretofore focus on conjectured
behavior at a high velocity. But some dark matter might be at rest,
like many of the atoms of our bodies. Gravity is intimately
tied up with inertia, and unknown types of interactions could keep
some of the hypothetical dark matter at rest relative to our bodies.

All this is rank speculation, of course, but can you refute it?
I don't think you can.

> On the other hand, if
> we understand nothing about dark matter, it's just an empty buzzword
> that sounds sciency but means nothing. Pick one.

False dichotomy.


Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
University of So. Carolina at Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[John Harshman]

On 6/23/23 6:05 AM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Friday, June 23, 2023 at 12:40:16 AM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
>> On 6/22/23 7:07 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
>
> You left out the cautionary words that preceded the following
> highly speculative paragraph that one sees next:
>
>>> Might the seat of our consciousness be dark matter pervading our
>>> bodies, the way Epicurus thought it lay in special atoms pervading
>>> our bodies? That would be a modern "third way" between Epicurus
>>> and the materialistic claim that our bodies, made just of the
>>> familiar old atoms, are responsible for our conscious selves.
>
>> If we understand anything whatsoever about dark matter, that isn't
>> possible. It interacts with normal matter only gravitationally,
>
> Have you read the Wikipedia entry on dark matter?
> -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter

I hadn't until you mentioned it. But what in all that contradicts what I
said? What supports your claim that dark matter might be somehow
attached to your body?

> Your confident opening sentence is very far from being
> adequately supported there, and the second sentence doesn't
> do justice to what astronomers know; I'd start with:

> "There has been overwhelming evidence for at least two decades that there
> is an unknown form of matter that has profound gravitational effects on galaxies."

Yes, gravitational. Nothing else, you will note.

> The experiments for detecting non-gravitational properties that
> one reads about at length in the Wikipedia entry are very far removed from
> an examination of human nerve impulses.

Yes, they are. What do human nerve impulses have to do with dark matter?
Why appeal to dark matter rather than tachyons or dilithium crystals?
Your use of the term is just as a magical buzzword, and you have to
ignore its actual properties, such as we infer them from the evidence.

> You need to keep in mind the wild card of quantum indeterminacy.
> This is the modern day analogue of Epicurus's idea that the
> (hypothetical) atoms that comprise the soul have a "swerve"
> that makes free will actions possible. I haven't heard of any
> experiments to estimate the probabilities of this or that neuronal
> action following a probability density curve different from what
> is seen in inanimate settings, have you?

Again, an appeal to magical buzzwords. Speculation is all very nice, but
it ought to be based on *something*.

>> so there would be nothing keeping it tethered to your body.
>
> The ways of studying dark matter heretofore focus on conjectured
> behavior at a high velocity. But some dark matter might be at rest,
> like many of the atoms of our bodies. Gravity is intimately
> tied up with inertia, and unknown types of interactions could keep
> some of the hypothetical dark matter at rest relative to our bodies.

Again, after all the nonsense about inertia, you are forced to appeal to
"unknown types of interactions". This is magical thinking. There's no
reason to attach this thinking to dark matter as opposed to some other
unknown particle or field. Except that "dark matter" sounds more
sciency. Inertia doesn't work, because we change velocity constantly,
and barring some major attractive force we would leave those inert
particles behind.

> All this is rank speculation, of course, but can you refute it?
> I don't think you can.

I can't refute an invisible, intangible, undetectable elephant in my
living room, but I don't propose it as an explanation for bad TV
reception either. It's pointless to refute any vacuous speculation. I
merely point out its vacuity.

What you postulate does not correspond to what we know (if that's the
word) about dark matter. Your imagined soul particles are not connected
to dark matter, and you might as well call them anything else, perhaps
throomions.

>> On the other hand, if
>> we understand nothing about dark matter, it's just an empty buzzword
>> that sounds sciency but means nothing. Pick one.
>
> False dichotomy.

Yet you don't suggest a third option. You just suggest that maybe dark
matter has whatever properties you need, despite the lack of evidence,
and in fact the considerable evidence of non-interaction. Even neutrinos
would be a better option; at least they do occasionally interact with
atoms. This is just nonsense. A proper speculation is at least not in
conflict with what we know, and ought to have at least some suggestion
of attachment to reality.

[Kalkidas]

I don't think I am describing that at all. I don't regard the mind, or
soul, or consciousness, as something that "pops out" of matter when it
reaches a certain configuration. I regard matter and spirit as eternally
separate but related energies.

My understanding is that Descartes, while proposing two very different
substances, was then unable to discover how they related to one another
in a causal way, in terms of their mutual influence. He suggested that
perhaps the pineal gland was some sort of interface between the
inanimate res extensa and the thinking res cogitans. But nothing ever
came of this idea, and so "Cartesian dualism" was abandoned by philosophers.

Had he known about the Vedic philosophy -- which preceded that of the
Greeks by many centuries, things might have turned out differently. He
would have seen that his two substances are actually sister energies of
the Supreme Lord, and it is the Lord who integrates them into the world
Descartes observed.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, June 21, 2023 at 12:40:13 PM UTC-4, Martin Harran wrote:
> On Wed, 21 Jun 2023 06:10:48 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"

> <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >On Tuesday, June 20, 2023 at 10:30:13?PM UTC-4, Lawyer Daggett wrote:

...nothing that appears below.

> [匽
> >All through the post to which I've replied, you've restricted
> >yourself to insults for which you haven't given a single
> >illustrative example, or even hinted at one. So you have
> >yet to initiate the process I've described.

> So speaks he who said he would produce examples of my lack o0r respect
> for the teaching of Jesus - twelve weeks have elapsed and you haven't
> produced a single example.

You are shamelessly lying. I caught you red-handed in recklessly disregarding
Jesus's commandment, "Do not bear false witness" on another thread, where
you spewed outrageous falsehoods about me:

https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/xqiemRxP0mI/m/zJ8rzQ7uAAAJ
Re: A thread about banning, paradoxically about stopping discussion of banning
Jun 9, 2023, 7:05:49 PM


I thoroughly refuted the following two-part falsehood of yours there:

"as is well known here, if
you are not Peter's friend you are de facto his enemy"


Not content with that, you finished that sentence with an even more monstrous falsehood:

"and therefore, in his eyes, open to any kind of accusation however unfounded."

This is more outrageous than *anything* that ANYONE
has ever accused me of on the internet, including jillery.

To make matters even worse, you wrote these things in a direct reply to Bill Rogers,
who has me killfiled and cannot know how outrageously you misrepresented me:


You actually replied to the post I linked above, and deleted your lies
-- now that you've shamelessly lied about me above, I make bold to call them that--
calling my reaction to them "obfuscation" and demanding that
I do something that would have no bearing on the shameless lie that you uttered here.


What do you suppose will happen to you after you die (if anything)
if you do not repent of this behaviour?


Peter Nyikos

[Martin Harran]

On Fri, 23 Jun 2023 08:14:15 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
<peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:

>On Wednesday, June 21, 2023 at 12:40:13?PM UTC-4, Martin Harran wrote:
>> On Wed, 21 Jun 2023 06:10:48 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
>> <peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> >On Tuesday, June 20, 2023 at 10:30:13?PM UTC-4, Lawyer Daggett wrote:
>
>...nothing that appears below.
>

>> [?

>> >All through the post to which I've replied, you've restricted
>> >yourself to insults for which you haven't given a single
>> >illustrative example, or even hinted at one. So you have
>> >yet to initiate the process I've described.
>
>> So speaks he who said he would produce examples of my lack o0r respect
>> for the teaching of Jesus - twelve weeks have elapsed and you haven't
>> produced a single example.
>
>You are shamelessly lying. I caught you red-handed in recklessly disregarding
>Jesus's commandment, "Do not bear false witness" on another thread, where
>you spewed outrageous falsehoods about me:
>
>https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/xqiemRxP0mI/m/zJ8rzQ7uAAAJ
>Re: A thread about banning, paradoxically about stopping discussion of banning

>Jun 9, 2023, 7:05:49?PM

>
>
>I thoroughly refuted the following two-part falsehood of yours there:
>
>"as is well known here, if
>you are not Peter's friend you are de facto his enemy"
>
>
>Not content with that, you finished that sentence with an even more monstrous falsehood:
>
>"and therefore, in his eyes, open to any kind of accusation however unfounded."
>
>This is more outrageous than *anything* that ANYONE
>has ever accused me of on the internet, including jillery.
>
>To make matters even worse, you wrote these things in a direct reply to Bill Rogers,
>who has me killfiled and cannot know how outrageously you misrepresented me:
>
>
>You actually replied to the post I linked above, and deleted your lies
>-- now that you've shamelessly lied about me above, I make bold to call them that--
>calling my reaction to them "obfuscation" and demanding that
>I do something that would have no bearing on the shameless lie that you uttered here.
>
>
>What do you suppose will happen to you after you die (if anything)
>if you do not repent of this behaviour?

You really do need to get help

[jillery]

On Thu, 22 Jun 2023 10:01:27 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
<peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:


Apparently, PeeWee Peter is so anxious to involve jillery in this
topic that he has to troll mindless made-up crap about jillery. That's
just one of the things he has in common with Harran.

[jillery]

On Fri, 23 Jun 2023 06:44:07 -0700, John Harshman
<john.h...@gmail.com> wrote:

>On 6/23/23 6:05 AM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:

AOTA is mooted by the first sentence from the Wikipedia article:
*************************************
Dark matter is a hypothetical form of matter thought to account for
approximately 85% of the matter in the universe.
**************************************

The key words in the above are HYPOTHETICAL and THOUGHT, as it's
unknown that it's even matter. All that's known for certain is there
are documented phenomena where large regions of space demonstrate
gravitational characteristics inconsistent with GR and can't be
accounted for except by some kind of cold dark matter that neither
absorbs nor emits EMR but is attracted by gravity. All of the
speculations in the attributed text are without any basis.

[John Harshman]

American Occupational Therapy Association??

> is mooted by the first sentence from the Wikipedia article:
> *************************************
> Dark matter is a hypothetical form of matter thought to account for
> approximately 85% of the matter in the universe.
> **************************************
>
> The key words in the above are HYPOTHETICAL and THOUGHT, as it's
> unknown that it's even matter. All that's known for certain is there
> are documented phenomena where large regions of space demonstrate
> gravitational characteristics inconsistent with GR and can't be
> accounted for except by some kind of cold dark matter that neither
> absorbs nor emits EMR but is attracted by gravity. All of the
> speculations in the attributed text are without any basis.

Sorry, what attributed text?

[Burkhard]

For a given value of "middle ages" ;o)

There is an old idea of the "weighing of souls", most famously in Egyptian religion , when Anubis weighs your heart to decide your post-mortem fate. Psychostasis then also comes up in Judaism , e.g. Job 31:6, which then becomes in Christianity Archangel Michael weighing souls at judgement day. Now I'd say most of the time, this was understood as metaphorical, or normative: not a real weight, but the worth of the soul was weighted (hence the Egyptian "lighter than a feather" motive.) But it's true at one point in time, in parts of Europe, ordinary people seem to have taken it more literally, and often replaced the heart of the deceased with stones (or for richer folks, gold) to give them "more weight (so the opposite of the Egyptian approach) . But this was never endorsed by any theologians or philosophers.

This practice also seems to have come to an end in the early middle ages. The idea that a could really can be weighted is firmly an idea of modernity. The most famous example is from 1907, the 21 grams experiment by Duncan MacDougall, a doctor from Massachusetts. He weighted dying people shortly before and after their demise and determined the soul weighs 21 gram - attempts to repeat this were made in 2001 by a Lewis E. Hollander, and 2005 by a Gerard Nahum who wanted to use some electromagnetic detectors, but neither Stanford or Yale, to their credit, were willing to participate.

So it seems the middle ages where one time where people did NOT believe this :o)

[broger...@gmail.com]

Well, yes, that's why I said "even into the Middle Ages" rather than "all through the Middle Ages." I was remembering the story of some Medieval king who had heard about the weight of the soul and disproved the idea by weighing a fish before and after it died, but I heard that story in elementary school and I don't remember where it came from.

[Ernest Major]

On 25/06/2023 12:02, Burkhard wrote:
> For a given value of "middle ages" ;o)
>
> There is an old idea of the "weighing of souls", most famously in Egyptian religion , when Anubis weighs your heart to decide your post-mortem fate. Psychostasis then also comes up in Judaism , e.g. Job 31:6, which then becomes in Christianity Archangel Michael weighing souls at judgement day. Now I'd say most of the time, this was understood as metaphorical, or normative: not a real weight, but the worth of the soul was weighted (hence the Egyptian "lighter than a feather" motive.) But it's true at one point in time, in parts of Europe, ordinary people seem to have taken it more literally, and often replaced the heart of the deceased with stones (or for richer folks, gold) to give them "more weight (so the opposite of the Egyptian approach) . But this was never endorsed by any theologians or philosophers.
>
> This practice also seems to have come to an end in the early middle ages. The idea that a could really can be weighted is firmly an idea of modernity. The most famous example is from 1907, the 21 grams experiment by Duncan MacDougall, a doctor from Massachusetts. He weighted dying people shortly before and after their demise and determined the soul weighs 21 gram - attempts to repeat this were made in 2001 by a Lewis E. Hollander, and 2005 by a Gerard Nahum who wanted to use some electromagnetic detectors, but neither Stanford or Yale, to their credit, were willing to participate.
>
> So it seems the middle ages where one time where people did NOT believe this :o)

I think I've encountered the idea that the soul is made of tryptamine in
the wild. I was talking to a chap who was 1) impressed that tryptamine
is found in all organisms (tryptamine is a metabolic product of the
proteinogenic amino acid tryptophan produced by decarboxylation -
there's a (gut) bacterial enzyme that catalyses the reaction, but I'd
expect that it occurs at a low rate anyway - so I'm not surprised that
it might be present in all organisms) and 2) told me that the human body
contains a few grams of tryptamine, and body weight drops by that amount
when one dies (but I can think of several other ways weight might change
during the process of death, but not of one wherein one might lose ones
inventory of this particular compound).

These ideas are probably tied in with the use of modified tryptamines
such as N,N-dimethyltryptamine (ayahuasca) and psilocybin (magic
mushrooms) as entheogens.

--
alias Ernest Major

[peter2...@gmail.com]

Having recounted your reckless disregard of Jesus's commandment, "Do not bear
false witness" above, I asked the following question about it:

> >What do you suppose will happen to you after you die (if anything)
> >if you do not repent of this behaviour?

And you replied with the one-liner,

> You really do need to get help

Are you saying this because you think I am taking the possibility far too seriously
of there being a life after death, with different outcomes that depend on what
one does in this life?

I wouldn't dream of asking such a question of John Harshman, who is convinced
that the notions of a life after death and God are fairy tales which mature adults

need to grow out of.

On the other hand, I thought that, since you say that your Catholic religion means
a lot to you, you would give a less cryptic answer than your one-liner.


Peter Nyikos

PS I am back from spending two weeks in extraordinarily intense mathematical
work with others, and I do not expect to make such a long posting break until
my usual seasonal break that begins shortly before Christmas.

[Martin Harran]

On Wed, 12 Jul 2023 12:28:37 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
<peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:

My observation was based on your entire post, not just your "Have you
stopped beating your wife?" style question.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

You duck this new question with a meaningless polemical device, followed by
a misrepresentation of my question:

> My observation was based on your entire post, not just your "Have you
> stopped beating your wife?" style question.

You are just being more cryptic about your alleged "observation",
for which you give not an iota of evidence.

My question is not of the "Yes you lose, no you lose"
style as that hoary classic, but could have been answered in any number of ways,
one of which is suggested by what I wrote next:

> >I wouldn't dream of asking such a question of John Harshman, who is convinced
> >that the notions of a life after death and God are fairy tales which mature adults
> >need to grow out of.


> >On the other hand, I thought that, since you say that your Catholic religion means
> >a lot to you, you would give a less cryptic answer than your one-liner.

Are you afraid to give an account of what you believe or disbelieve about life after death?


Peter Nyikos

[Martin Harran]

On Wed, 12 Jul 2023 17:19:23 -0700 (PDT), "peter2...@gmail.com"
<peter2...@gmail.com> wrote:

Yes it is.

>style as that hoary classic, but could have been answered in any number of ways,
>one of which is suggested by what I wrote next:
>
>> >I wouldn't dream of asking such a question of John Harshman, who is convinced
>> >that the notions of a life after death and God are fairy tales which mature adults
>> >need to grow out of.
>
>
>> >On the other hand, I thought that, since you say that your Catholic religion means
>> >a lot to you, you would give a less cryptic answer than your one-liner.
>
>Are you afraid to give an account of what you believe or disbelieve about life after death?

I have explained to you ad nauseam why treat you as I do and don't try
to have a rational discussion with you. As recently as last December,
I reminded you:

"It's because of the lies you tell about me; the insults you throw at
me; the way you bring my name into discussions in which I have had no
part; the way you accuse me of taking part in some sort of grand
conspiracy against you, an imaginary conspiracy formed purely by your
paranoia."

I reminded you yet again in this very thread back just before you went
off on your break:

"In my own case, *hostility* has nothing to do with your views about
evolution, it is a direct reaction to the way you tell lies and try to
impugn my character and that of others who disagree with you [匽 Add
to that your exceptionally irritating posting style of replying to
points that are many layers deep, using threads to attack people who
are not involved in the thread and dragging in obscure arguments from
other newsgroups which most people here do not participate in."

Even in your post above, you have tried to drag Harshman's name into
something he hasn't been involved in. I (and others) have been telling
you these things for years but they have had no impact on you
whatsoever. Here's a typical example from me back in 2021:

"If you stick to the topic, I might [join in the discussion]. If you
start things like trying to drag in posters who aren't involved, or
issues from other threads, or discussions from other newsgroups, then
I certainly won't."

And one from back in 2019:

"Peter, I have told you before that I have no interest whatsoever in
trying to make sense of any of your posts where you hop about like a
demented hare from poster to poster and up and down attribute levels
like a yo-yo in the hands of somebody that is drunk."

[Mark Isaak]

Even though it is a rerun, I nominate this for a Chez Watt,
Compelling images category:

> . . . your posts where you hop about like a

> demented hare from poster to poster and up and down attribute levels
> like a yo-yo in the hands of somebody that is drunk.

--
Mark Isaak
"Wisdom begins when you discover the difference between 'That
doesn't make sense' and 'I don't understand.'" - Mary Doria Russell

[peter2...@gmail.com]

I'm back from my unavoidable posting break, and I hope you are still reading this thread, Kalkidas.
There's lots we could still discuss about what we and Bill Rogers wrote below.

On Friday, June 23, 2023 at 10:25:16 AM UTC-4, Kalkidas wrote:
> On 6/22/2023 7:07 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Thursday, June 22, 2023 at 8:10:15 PM UTC-4, Kalkidas wrote:
> >> On 6/22/2023 3:20 PM, broger...@gmail.com wrote:
> >>> On Thursday, June 22, 2023 at 6:10:15 PM UTC-4, Kalkidas wrote:
> >>>> On 6/22/2023 11:43 AM, broger...@gmail.com wrote:
> >>>>> On Thursday, June 22, 2023 at 1:35:16 PM UTC-4, Kalkidas wrote:
> >
> >>>>>> Now, pain and suffering exist where? In the senses of the body.
> >>>>>> Therefore, Epicurus' philosophy is literally "sensual hedonism", i.e.
> >>>>>> bodily pleasure.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> In the quote I gave you from Epicurus' Letter to Menoeceus, Epicurus explicitly refers to "trouble in the soul," he restricts neither pleasures nor pains to those of the body.
> >
> >>>> But atomistic materialism necessitates that the soul is a mere
> >>>> collection of atoms just like the body. So yet again, Epicurus, ignoring
> >>>> standard ideas of the soul as a non-material conscious spiritual entity,
> >>>> has idiosyncratically defined "soul" for his own purposes. Indeed, the
> >>>> soul of Epicurus is just another body.

All true as far as Epicurus was concerned, but we now have a more
many-faceted understanding of physics than he did; that accounts
for what I wrote next.

> > Our understanding of the universe has progressed to the point where
> > this may be a false dichotomy. People who dare to suggest the following
> > possibility are likely to be misrepresented as believing it and therefore
> > being cranks and kooks, but I've learned to live with misrepresentations
> > like this, and so I state it here.
> >
> > Might the seat of our consciousness be dark matter pervading our
> > bodies, the way Epicurus thought it lay in special atoms pervading
> > our bodies? That would be a modern "third way" between Epicurus
> > and the materialistic claim that our bodies, made just of the
> > familiar old atoms, are responsible for our conscious selves.

A slight amendation: our seat of consciousness could be localized
in our brains. Descartes suggested the pineal gland, but I think the
relay center of the brain, the thalamus, is a better candidate for that.

> >
> >>>>> You are reading Cartesian dualism into a philosopher who worked a couple of thousand years before such dualism became a "standard idea."
> >
> >>>> That's rich. I have not even remotely suggested "Cartesian dualism".
> >>>
> >>> Sure you have - "Standard ideas of the soul as a non-material conscious, spiritual entity" is straight up Cartesian dualism.

By the same standards, Bill is espousing Epicureanism.

> >
> > Actually, Descartes generally avoided the word "soul," and tried to argue from first principles for
> > the nature of the "mind" as being identical with the conscious ("thinking") self. By the way, the word "self"
> > is used in the standard translations of the Chandogya Upanishad for the word "atman." It parts
> > company with Christian views of the soul by its apparent support at the end for the dogma that "atman is Brahman."

It's a fascinating conclusion to one of the longest Upanishads. It passes through four phases
as to what the self is. The first, embraced by the demons but not by the hero of the dialogue, the god Indra,
is materialism that is incompatible with a life after death. The second is that the self, after death,
is like one experiencing a pleasant dream. But Indra objects that dreams can also be nightmares.

His "guru," Prajapati, admits this but later gives the third phase, which is what many Hindus
(and many non-Hindu Western popularizers) think of as Nirvana: a dreamless sleep.

But Indra isn't satisfied: this is too much like Epicureanism: the self is like one gone to annihilation.

The fourth and final phase is one that is harmonious with Christian belief in heaven, except
at the very end, where the individual self is identified with the Supreme Person
(*uttama* *purusa*). Traditional Christianity is based on three divine Persons as the
supreme being, who remain separate from the souls of created beings in heaven.


Here I snipped things to which you did not reply; ironically, it is centered on the very thing
on which others picked up; but you didn't respond to them.

> > And now I come to what you added this time around:
> >
> >> The key point you're missing is that in "Cartesian dualism" there is no
> >> causal relationship from res cogitans to res extensa. I have not
> >> proposed Cartesian dualism.
> >
> > You are describing epiphenomenalism, not Cartesian dualism,
> > which is a philosophy of mind-body interactionism.

> I don't think I am describing that at all. I don't regard the mind, or
> soul, or consciousness, as something that "pops out" of matter when it
> reaches a certain configuration. I regard matter and spirit as eternally
> separate but related energies.

That is compatible with what I wrote: epiphenomenalism is, at bottom,
a philosophy that consciousness, whatever its source, has no effect
on our behavior -- "no causal causal relationship from res cogitans to res extensa."
It then goes on to say that our physical bodies ("res extensa") have everything to do with
what we are conscious *of*. It is a physicalist brand of determinism.

> My understanding is that Descartes, while proposing two very different
> substances, was then unable to discover how they related to one another
> in a causal way, in terms of their mutual influence. He suggested that
> perhaps the pineal gland was some sort of interface between the
> inanimate res extensa and the thinking res cogitans.

He might have done better to choose the thalamus; see above.

>But nothing ever
> came of this idea, and so "Cartesian dualism" was abandoned by philosophers.

I don't think that was the only reason, but the vastly over-rated Gilbert Ryle
may have achieved this end polemically, by his taunt, "How does the ghost work the machine?"
Anyone espousing interactionism was severely handicapped by inability
to articulate how what they intuitively knew -- that we do have free will --
could be accounted for.

> Had he known about the Vedic philosophy -- which preceded that of the
> Greeks by many centuries, things might have turned out differently. He
> would have seen that his two substances are actually sister energies of
> the Supreme Lord, and it is the Lord who integrates them into the world
> Descartes observed.

Hume took this integration for granted, without espousing a role for the Supreme Lord,
while Leibnitz explained it by his theory of monads that were put into perfect harmony by the same Lord.
All this is mind-body parallellism, which I talked about next.

> >
> > Another form of dualism is mind-body parallelism,
> > expounded in different forms by Malebranche and Leibnitz, but NOT Descartes.
> > Bill obviously did not read enough philosophy to learn about all this.
> >
> >
> >> I guess it's my turn to recommend that you actually read something.
> >
> > Looks like you BOTH need to do some reading.

I'm not sure which reading would benefit you, but by all means
read the closing dialogue in the Chandogya Upanishad between Indra and Prajapati
if you haven't done so already.


Peter Nyikos

Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

University of So. Carolina in Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Thursday, July 13, 2023 at 11:25:39 AM UTC-4, Mark Isaak wrote:
> Even though it is a rerun, I nominate this for a Chez Watt,
> Compelling images category:
>
> > . . . your posts where you hop about like a
> > demented hare from poster to poster and up and down attribute levels
> > like a yo-yo in the hands of somebody that is drunk.

A good one, even though the word "Compelling" is in the YMMV category.
But I don't begrudge you your mileage.


Peter Nyikos

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Friday, June 23, 2023 at 9:45:16 AM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
> On 6/23/23 6:05 AM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> > On Friday, June 23, 2023 at 12:40:16 AM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
> >> On 6/22/23 7:07 PM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:
> >
> > You left out the cautionary words that preceded the following
> > highly speculative paragraph that one sees next:

I made a mistake not to repost them: you took the proverbial mile
below from my giving of that inch. I take back that inch:

======================

People who dare to suggest the following
possibility are likely to be misrepresented as believing it and therefore
being cranks and kooks, but I've learned to live with misrepresentations
like this, and so I state it here.

======================================

And only then did I state it:

> >>> Might the seat of our consciousness be dark matter pervading our
> >>> bodies, the way Epicurus thought it lay in special atoms pervading
> >>> our bodies? That would be a modern "third way" between Epicurus
> >>> and the materialistic claim that our bodies, made just of the
> >>> familiar old atoms, are responsible for our conscious selves.
> >
> >> If we understand anything whatsoever about dark matter, that isn't
> >> possible. It interacts with normal matter only gravitationally,
> >
> > Have you read the Wikipedia entry on dark matter?
> > -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter

> I hadn't until you mentioned it. But what in all that contradicts what I said?

Efforts to detect dark matter are described that do contradict your unequivocal
"that isn't possible."

The following article goes deeper into details:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter

> What supports your claim that dark matter might be somehow
> attached to your body?

It wasn't a claim, it was a question, and nothing in either reference
contradicts a Yes answer.

> > Your confident opening sentence is very far from being
> > adequately supported there, and the second sentence doesn't
> > do justice to what astronomers know; I'd start with:
>
> > "There has been overwhelming evidence for at least two decades that there
> > is an unknown form of matter that has profound gravitational effects on galaxies."

> Yes, gravitational. Nothing else, you will note.

Not in that sentence, but see above.

> > The experiments for detecting non-gravitational properties that
> > one reads about at length in the Wikipedia entry are very far removed from
> > an examination of human nerve impulses.

> Yes, they are. What do human nerve impulses have to do with dark matter?
> Why appeal to dark matter rather than tachyons or dilithium crystals?

You are too enamored of science fiction to see how different "dilithium crystals"
are from dark matter. Tachyons are more serious entities, but nothing about
which we know suggests their actual existence.

> Your use of the term is just as a magical buzzword,

Unsupportable insult, part of your "taking a mile," noted.
You are flirting with the temptation of "Lying for Epicurus," as
your cunning polemic below illustrates.

> and you have to ignore its actual properties,
> such as we infer them from the evidence.

I do not ignore THOSE properties, which you ignorantly
call "its actual properties," followed by the spin-doctored
"such as we infer them" rather than the correct "of which we know".

You are still under the spell of your cocksure earlier words...

> >> "If we understand anything whatsoever about dark matter, that isn't
> >> possible. It interacts with normal matter only gravitationally,

And of your contrary-to-fact words that immediately followed them:

> >> On the other hand, if
> >> we understand nothing about dark matter, it's just an empty buzzword
> >> that sounds sciency but means nothing.

> > You need to keep in mind the wild card of quantum indeterminacy.
> > This is the modern day analogue of Epicurus's idea that the
> > (hypothetical) atoms that comprise the soul have a "swerve"
> > that makes free will actions possible. I haven't heard of any
> > experiments to estimate the probabilities of this or that neuronal
> > action following a probability density curve different from what
> > is seen in inanimate settings, have you?

> Again, an appeal to magical buzzwords.

You are just showing your ignorance of the philosophy of mind.
There is active research on the limits of free will, but AFAIK it hasn't
reached this stage of sophistication yet.


Continued in next reply, to be done tomorrow at the latest.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics

University of So. Carolina -- standard disclaimer--
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[John Harshman]

Please point it out for me. What other interactions is dark matter
theorized to have? Is there any evidence for any of those interactions?
And finally, how would these interactions enable dark matter to be bound
to your brain?

>>> The experiments for detecting non-gravitational properties that
>>> one reads about at length in the Wikipedia entry are very far removed from
>>> an examination of human nerve impulses.
>
>> Yes, they are. What do human nerve impulses have to do with dark matter?
>> Why appeal to dark matter rather than tachyons or dilithium crystals?
>
> You are too enamored of science fiction to see how different "dilithium crystals"
> are from dark matter. Tachyons are more serious entities, but nothing about
> which we know suggests their actual existence.

You are appealing to unknown and dubious properties of a hypothetical
substance. The fact that this substance explains a known phenomenon goes
some way to render it less hypothetical, but the properties you want are
still dubious. That you are forced to invent these properties, for which
there is no evidence, turns it into a buzzword that means whatever you
need it to mean.

>> Your use of the term is just as a magical buzzword,
>
> Unsupportable insult, part of your "taking a mile," noted.
> You are flirting with the temptation of "Lying for Epicurus," as
> your cunning polemic below illustrates.

Don't take so much offense. I was pointing out that there is no basis
for your hypothesis. No lying, no cunning polemic. Please try to contain
your rage in order to conduct a civilized discussion.

>> and you have to ignore its actual properties,
>> such as we infer them from the evidence.
>
> I do not ignore THOSE properties, which you ignorantly
> call "its actual properties," followed by the spin-doctored
> "such as we infer them" rather than the correct "of which we know".
>
> You are still under the spell of your cocksure earlier words...

See how that says nothing? Please remove the invective and substitute
content in its place. What properties? From what can be told, dark
matter interacts gravitationally but in no other detectable way with
normal matter. Is that not true?

>>>> "If we understand anything whatsoever about dark matter, that isn't
>>>> possible. It interacts with normal matter only gravitationally,
>
> And of your contrary-to-fact words that immediately followed them:
>
>>>> On the other hand, if
>>>> we understand nothing about dark matter, it's just an empty buzzword
>>>> that sounds sciency but means nothing.
>
>
>>> You need to keep in mind the wild card of quantum indeterminacy.
>>> This is the modern day analogue of Epicurus's idea that the
>>> (hypothetical) atoms that comprise the soul have a "swerve"
>>> that makes free will actions possible. I haven't heard of any
>>> experiments to estimate the probabilities of this or that neuronal
>>> action following a probability density curve different from what
>>> is seen in inanimate settings, have you?
>
>> Again, an appeal to magical buzzwords.
>
> You are just showing your ignorance of the philosophy of mind.
> There is active research on the limits of free will, but AFAIK it hasn't
> reached this stage of sophistication yet.

Doesn't that require that there is such a thing as free will? But the
concept itself seems incoherent. Quantum indeterminacy doesn't seem to
add anything that renders the concept less incoherent.

[jillery]

>impugn my character and that of others who disagree with you […] Add

>to that your exceptionally irritating posting style of replying to
>points that are many layers deep, using threads to attack people who
>are not involved in the thread and dragging in obscure arguments from
>other newsgroups which most people here do not participate in."
>
>Even in your post above, you have tried to drag Harshman's name into
>something he hasn't been involved in. I (and others) have been telling
>you these things for years but they have had no impact on you
>whatsoever. Here's a typical example from me back in 2021:
>
>"If you stick to the topic, I might [join in the discussion]. If you
>start things like trying to drag in posters who aren't involved, or
>issues from other threads, or discussions from other newsgroups, then
>I certainly won't."
>
>And one from back in 2019:
>
>"Peter, I have told you before that I have no interest whatsoever in
>trying to make sense of any of your posts where you hop about like a
>demented hare from poster to poster and up and down attribute levels
>like a yo-yo in the hands of somebody that is drunk."

So killfile him already, and quit yer bitchin'.

[erik simpson]

Excellent advice.

[peter2...@gmail.com]

On Friday, June 23, 2023 at 9:45:16 AM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
> On 6/23/23 6:05 AM, peter2...@gmail.com wrote:

Repeating a paragraph, for context:

> > The ways of studying dark matter heretofore focus on conjectured
> > behavior at a high velocity. But some dark matter might be at rest,
> > like many of the atoms of our bodies. Gravity is intimately
> > tied up with inertia, and unknown types of interactions could keep
> > some of the hypothetical dark matter at rest relative to our bodies.

<snip of things to be dealt with next week>

> > All this is rank speculation, of course, but can you refute it?
> > I don't think you can.

> I can't refute an invisible, intangible, undetectable elephant in my
> living room, but I don't propose it as an explanation for bad TV
> reception either.

This grotesque "analogy" needs to be compared
with an analogy that so completely floored you, that you
came all apart in reply:

________________ excerpts from reply to you, names added in brackets _________

John:
> >> PE has zip to do with the Cambrian explosion.
[...]

[Peter:]
> > by similar, but slightly less radical standards than yours,
> > the Modern Synthesis, a.k.a. neo-Darwinism, has zip to do with the Cambrian explosion,
> > because it stops at speciation.
> >
> > This applies *a fortiori* to the widespread definition of "evolution" as "change of frequency
> > of alleles in a population." Moreover, we might as well go beyond the case of the Cambrian
> > explosion to the grand panoply of organisms that are the result of over 3 billion years
> > of evolution in the more common meaning of the word, the one that creationists cannot cope with.

[Peter:]
The bottom line here is that modern evolutionary theory cannot cope with it either,
making biologists powerless to explain mega-evolution that involves such huge transitions as the
one from fully aquatic fish to fully land-based reptiles in the short time it took.

Unfortunately, your reply makes you look a lot worse than them:

[John:]
> All I can gather from this reply is that I've said something you don't
> like.

[Peter:]
All I can gather from your retort is that you are so helpless in the face of
this bottom line, which is so central to talk.origins, that you have blotted it out of your mind.
[...]
How sad is that?

========================= end of excerpts
from
https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/0XgjzJpuiMA/m/tmZ_7bNKAgAJ
Re: EVIDENCE OF DESIGN IN NATURE?

> It's pointless to refute any vacuous speculation. I
> merely point out its vacuity.

You lack the competence to "point out" anything like this,
just as you lack the competence to "point out" that God, and a life after death,
are fairy tales that mature adults need to grow out of.


<snip of things to be dealt with next week>

> This is just nonsense. A proper speculation is at least not in
> conflict with what we know,

Nothing I have written is in conflict with anything we
[including physicists and cosmologists] know.

> and ought to have at least some suggestion
> of attachment to reality.

You lack the competence to judge what has attachment
to reality and what does not. You made that clear with
the fragment from your rant that I reproduced above, and that's
only the beginning of how completely you were floored
by my analogy.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

Univ. of So. Carolina at Columbia
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[John Harshman]

I have to ask: do you even care if anyone is able to follow your random
swerves?

[Martin Harran]

On Fri, 14 Jul 2023 08:21:57 -0700 (PDT), erik simpson
<eastsi...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> >impugn my character and that of others who disagree with you [匽 Add

>> >to that your exceptionally irritating posting style of replying to
>> >points that are many layers deep, using threads to attack people who
>> >are not involved in the thread and dragging in obscure arguments from
>> >other newsgroups which most people here do not participate in."
>> >
>> >Even in your post above, you have tried to drag Harshman's name into
>> >something he hasn't been involved in. I (and others) have been telling
>> >you these things for years but they have had no impact on you
>> >whatsoever. Here's a typical example from me back in 2021:
>> >
>> >"If you stick to the topic, I might [join in the discussion]. If you
>> >start things like trying to drag in posters who aren't involved, or
>> >issues from other threads, or discussions from other newsgroups, then
>> >I certainly won't."
>> >
>> >And one from back in 2019:
>> >
>> >"Peter, I have told you before that I have no interest whatsoever in
>> >trying to make sense of any of your posts where you hop about like a
>> >demented hare from poster to poster and up and down attribute levels
>> >like a yo-yo in the hands of somebody that is drunk."
>> So killfile him already, and quit yer bitchin'.
>> --
>Excellent advice.

I don't engage with Peter without killfiling him because he regularly
tosses out bullshit about me in conversations in which I am not
involved (as he does with others) and I like to keep an eye on that.
That's different from another poster whom I have killfiled because
that poster's snide remarks are so puerile that their snideness is
glaringly self-evident and they don't warrant being addressed.

[jillery]

On Sat, 15 Jul 2023 14:23:53 +0100, Martin Harran

>>> >impugn my character and that of others who disagree with you […] Add

Because it's OBVIOUS? Once again Harran shows his hypocrisy.