Hi Duke...
Good to hear from you. Sounds like you're having fun with this one!
I'll interpolate my responses into your own text:
Hi Chas,
thanks once again for your posts, they really have switched on the old brain box and i find im finally looking into some of the ideas ive so far only vaguely held.
Here goes, ive been looking at your first post and starting at the beginning... "If Life arose spontaneously from un-alive chemicals (Matter/Energy), where did the Life in the living form come from? It MUST have been present (as some form of potential) within those un-alive chemicals, must it not?"
ok, my question is why does Life have to be present as a potential within un-alive chemicals? can't life be a product of the physical conditions which allow it to exist? My point still stands:
Physical stuff certainly does provide the framework or 'conditions' within which Life operates, or is 'allowed to exist', as you put it, but where does this Life come from before it is 'allowed to exist' somewhere?
It always reduces to two choices: either from outside physical stuff, or from within it. There is no third option. There just ain't.
If it comes from outside physical stuff, then Materialism is immediately and straightforwardly wrong, is it not? So, for Materialism to hold, the ONLY alternative is that Life must somehow lie within 'unalive' physical stuff: and thus we're back to the paradox of something being both A and not-A at the same time; and 'paradox' means 'contradiction'; and 'contradiction' means 'non-sense'. Thus Materialism is, literally, non-sense.
This simple either/or split between Materialism and Idealism is a tricky one to come to terms with for most people (and boy, do some people kick and scream at the very idea of it!), and was certainly very challenging for me for a long time until I discovered that there IS a sort of third option, which seems to me to be logical and to thus make sense, albeit in a most unexpected way. Here goes:
Yogis (and similar) maintain that every particle of matter and quantum of energy in the universe is actually alive, each in its own way, with each being an expression of a life force of some sort as, for example, a daffodil is an expression of a daffodil-life-force. There are hierarchies of life forces, which somehow cooperate with other levels to allow for more and greater complexification of life forms (for example, what we call 'species').
This is, of course, an Idealist understanding, but it has the unexpected and welcome advantage of seeming to provide a reasonable (but not Materialistic) mechanism for how particles and quanta can apparently spontaneously produce Life: ie, they don't produce it, but express it, every single particle, in immensely complex combinations, from nucleons to elephants.
This 'third way' would also explain the mystery of how, say, a human body maintains its cohesion until the moment of death, when that cohesion immediately begins to fall apart. Creatures low in the hierarchy, like the billions of bacteria which digest our food for us, and the trillions of cells (those 'little lives' which allow DNA to do its stuff) which once made up the body of the Being-in-Charge (ie, the highest in the local hierarchy... that's you and me!) are suddenly released to behave freely and thus devour the flesh they once either served or were repelled from by the various immune systems, or to simply die, while the Being-in-Charge, who was until recently the life force that unified all the lower entities into its own service, abandons the body and pushes off to pastures new.
I can find no logical flaw in this idea. It is just unexpected, not illogical.
And the fact that it could explain so many observed facts-in-the-world inclines me towards investigating it further.
The implications of this idea are huge... reincarnation, for example, would no longer be 'outlawed'. Nor would ghosts, etc, which millions of people have reported seeing over the centuries, but which Materialism can not accept at any price.
It also raises all sorts of questions concerning God/ gods/ godlets/ buddhas/ intelligences/ dimensions etc
All big subjects...... no room here.
What im thinking of as an example would be human thought, allowable because of the way the human brain is. Always the same problem: how can unalive and unintelligent matter (brain) produce alive and intelligent thought (mind)... unless this same unalive and unintelligent matter somehow contains Life and Intelligence within itself in the first place? This paradox ('non-sense') crops up at every Materialist corner.
And if this 'brain' is so clever as to come up with things like E=mc2 and Hamlet, why is not smart enough to stop itself from dissolving into goo the moment a person dies?
The reason most scientists are sure that brain produces thought (and spontaneously, at that!... quite an achievement for something that is made up of unalive chemicals) is that they have raised the unproved Materialist hypothesis up to the level of Proved Truth….. as has almost everyone else in society, thanks to the unquestioning acceptance of scientists' pronouncements by journalist-popularisers of science, and school teachers.
In elevating this unproved hypothesis from the status of 'possible explanation' to 'dogmatic truth', science has entered a cul-de-sac and locked the gate behind it. It is a very brave scientist indeed who dares to question the sanctity of Scientific Materialism.
The fact that the brain uses chemicals and electric pulses does NOT automatically prove that these physical artefacts produce thoughts. You might just as reasonably claim that the thoughts produce the pulses, which is, as I hope I've made clear, the only way round that makes logical sense.
So… if unalive chemical goo and electric pulses do not spontaneously generate thought from within their own unalive natures.. well.. where do these thoughts come from? Same old question, and the same old answer: 'somewhere else'. Thus, again, Materialism does not hold.
Where this 'somewhere else' might be is an entirely different question, to be explored once this preliminary either/or issue has been clearly thought through and understood.
I hope you understand, to follow your logic through your argument i need to agree with your statements along the way. So thats why im hanging around at the beginning Absolutely! You are absolutely right to do this. Take nobody's word for it!
Everything hangs on that basic either/or, right at the beginning. Once you can accept the logic of the analysis I make (which you 'must' do if you can't fault the logic after carefully testing it yourself) then you can move on to the enthralling task of trying to make real sense of the universe. The key to all of this is to test that logical either/or as carefully and rigorously as you can.
Once you have satisfied yourself that YOU can't fault the logic of the case I'm presenting, and that YOU now have a trustworthy base to work from, all manner of unexpected things will begin to fall into place.
Conversely, if you can't be bothered to put in the effort to rigorously test my logic until you can HONESTLY accept it as your own.. then you will continue to be baffled and dispirited by the world, and especially by the bombastic pronouncements of Great Scientists!
Speaking of which, I was interested to see that Stephen Hawking has recently decided that the Grand Theory of Everything may take 'a little longer' than he had been anticipating. It's satisfying to see him tending just a little bit towards my prediction (last blog?) that this GTE will never be achieved. Thanks for your tentative support, Mr Hawking!
Is all this any help, Duke?
The issue is actually very simple... just unexpected! …because nobody at school or university ever seems to question scientists' certainty that Materialism is Truth.
Why not? Seriously... 'why not?'
I think it's because Science now wields the same power over society and how we think, that the Church once did... but that, again, is another story...
Please come back again if you wish. All good clean fun.
Jehovahs Witnesses : I too have been happy to think of them as trying to do me a good deed in their missionary, in fact half my family are practising JW's, quite liberal ones really, my Mum still expects Xmas presents. I think my anxieties with them were more about me not knowing enough about 'what' i thought i believed. I think this discussion has set me off on a path to sorting that out. Yes... 'belief' is the enemy of 'understanding'.
There are three grades of 'mindset', for want of a better word:
1 Belief: unquestioning, comforting (or terrifying, depending), irrational, simple, often paradoxical, unquestionable, dogmatic, passed down by others.
2 Understanding: rational, logical, testable, non-paradoxical, intricate, non-dogmatic, worked out for oneself.
3 Direct knowledge: delivered directly to one by one's Intuition. (That sentence bears close examination for its implications, if it interests you). This is too big a subject to examine here. Suffice it to say that when you KNOW, you know. Eg, on an elementary level… you don't need an argument or a 'belief' or logic to 'know' that you're happy, or bereft, or hungry, do you? Intuition can deliver much more than this.
You and I, Duke, have either shaken off or are currently shaking off the Belief stage, and are learning to operate in the Understanding stage. Sooner or later, Intuition and Direct Knowledge begin to kick in... connections suddenly appear, light-bulb moments shine out, and pennies drop... stuff like that. They did for me, anyway, and I'm sure they will for you and for anybody else who's interested enough to give Understanding a bash instead of relying on the second-hand and jumbled mish-mash of 'Belief' that's been ladled into them since birth.
Something ive found really interesting is how doing a bit of research on what you've talked about has revealed my own belief 'prejudices' i guess you could call it. I read a book by Lewis Wolpert once were he talked about people hanging onto their beliefs, being prejudiced against new/other beliefs because its hard to let go of ours when we've invested so much work into them (he said its a hard wired survival thing). For instance i find i will happily search for errors or try to disprove an idea that contradicts my beliefs but dont try to do disprove what i already hold to be true. This seems like a weakness to me and im sure you've something to say about it (if any of that makes sense!) Absolutely right again, Duke! You clearly mean business!
We are all victims of our upbringing, both in our social habits, and much more importantly, in our mental habits. We are most unlikely to have ever been taught how to think clearly, so most of us never do, and instead, we cling to our 'beliefs' as desperately as a drowning man does to a life belt, and thus remain just as confused and baffled as our parents and teachers were.
Until we realise we can do better, we waste no end of time arguing, and defending our 'beliefs'. What a pointless waste of life!
Why? Because a belief is not a fact. It's vague and ill-informed mish-mash, masquerading as a personal philosophy of some sort. It's rubbish, in other words, and there is no point whatsoever in defending it.
Beliefs are the enemy of clarity and progress. Chuck 'em out, says I, every one of them. Start afresh. Don't be frightened. The sky won't fall on you and you will probably feel yourself immediately rejuvenated.
The hard bit is to winkle out what our deeply held 'beliefs' actually are! But it's a job that needs doing and is a lot of fun. I found it so, at least. I was amazed at how much mental and emotional rubbish I was carrying around.
I'm glad Mr Wolpert pointed all that out to you. It's a shame he hasn't yet practised what he preaches, and looked within to examine his own 'beliefs'. He's another dogmatic Materialist, like Mr Dawkins, who has clearly never questioned his 'Truth'. Pity.
Anyway thats it for now.
Cheerio, Duke Cheerio, Duke. Happy thinking!
