Category Archives: Philosophy

Consciousness, Faith, Laws of Nature, Materialism, Monism vs Dualism

Superstition?

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“When you believe in things that you don’t understand
Then you suffer
Superstition ain’t the way”

Lyrics from ‘Superstitious’ by Stevie Wonder.

Many People delude themselves about their grip on reality…esp many materialist Atheists… whom love to condemn *Faith*.
They agree with the lyrics of Stevie wonders Song, and pretend they only ‘believe’ in cold facts… things they ‘understand’… yet this is self delusion.

Stevie Wonder was blind within hours of his Birth.
This makes me Wonder if he understands what light, sight and colours really are?
If not, is he being superstitious in believing other people really do posess an extra sence that he himself does not?


The Hadron Collider.

Does Stevie Wonder Believe in Gravity?
How Many people… if any… understand Gravity?
Are we all being ‘Superstitous’ in believing it to be a characteristic of Mass without understanding how this is so?
Perhapse we are!
The Bible says of Christ that… For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him:
And he is before all things, and by him all things consist. (Col 1:16,17)
It interests me to speculate that the quest by Particle Physicists to find the Graviton… is in fact a search for Christ!
(The Un-created Necessary Being… The final destination of the noble quest for ‘the theory of everything’)
What more I am amused by the reality that even if they discovery such a particle that this does not ‘eliminate’ Christ, for Christ then simply may be understood as what imparts the Gravitons nature. Contray to the delusions of folk like Dawkins, such descoveries dont eliminate any so-called ‘Gap for God’…. Theism is not ‘In Retreat’.

The same may be said about the science of the Mind/ Brain in that insights into it’s Electro-chemical processes do not prove the monist denial of the incorporeal inner being as postulated by dualism. Nor does it disprove freewill.
‘Free will’ participates in the formation of Neural pathways, and in the release of neuro-transmitters like Dopamine.
It is false to think that science is proving we are merely ‘Automations’.
That is an assumption. An interpretation of the facts baced upon pre-concieved materialist bias… nothing more.
The Brain is an ‘Interface’ between our incorporeal spirit and our bodies… by which we ‘feel’ our values as physical emotions.

So I laugh at the hypocritical naivety of Atheist Materialists… their vain belief that they don’t live by faith… that they ‘know’ Materialism is true…. that it has been proven!


Socrates about to drink Hemlock
Chærephon, put the question to the Oracle at Delphi, Whether any other man was wiser than Socrates? The answer given was that there was none wiser. Not being conscious of the possession of wisdom, Socrates was perplexed, till at last, after testing the supposed knowledge of many distinguished men, he interpreted the reply of the oracle as meaning that whereas other men thought they knew, he was one of the few conscious of their own ignorance.

The reality is We all believe in things which we don’t understand.
Thus those whom refuse to accept a particular tenet of the Bible *Until they understand it* …are kidding themselves as to the rationality of such a refusal. They are imposing an impossible standard, and as such are committing an act of self delusion.
They are not (as they claim) exercising a superior epistemology which trumps Bible believing faith… but via arbitrary whim they simply choose not to believe.
Dont be duped by the modern propaganda that Science has always been in conflict with Revealed religion!
To the contrary I argue thus: By all means continue the quest for knowledge, yet has not the scriptures proven true enough in what can and has already been weighed and measured… so that we ought to consider it trustworthy in those things which are currently beyond our scope of verification?
I believe this to be both a rational approach, and a wise one. It is the very Basis of science…*Faith!*
Faith that The Universe is intelligible because it was created orderly via Divine reason.

Christian Libertarianism, Consciousness, Cosmology, Faith, Freedom, Intelligent Design, Merciful Grace, Parables, Proverbs, Psalms, Salvation, Science, Theism, There is a God!, Vote Wikiriwhi!

There is a God! (part1)

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Blah?
Blah Blah Blah!
Blar Blah Blah Blah Blar Blah Blah Blah Blar Blah Blah Blah Blar Blah Blah Blah Blar Blah Blah Blah!

Blah Blar Blar!
Amen.
Tim Wikiriwhi.

“The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God…”
(Psalm 14vs1)

“For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:”
(Rom 1vs20)

Click to Read more…

Way too Starry for Atheism.

There is a God! (part 2)

There is a God! (part3) Divine Messengers

Atheism, Cosmology, Metaphysics, Physics, Science

Tegmark Tuesday

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Max Tegmark

Every time I’ve written ten mainstream papers, I allow myself to indulge in writing one wacky one, like my Scientific American article about parallel universes. This is because I have a burning curiosity about the ultimate nature of reality; indeed, this is why I went into physics in the first place. So far, I’ve learned one thing in this quest that I’m really sure of: whatever the ultimate nature of reality may turn out to be, it’s completely different from how it seems. So I feel a bit like the protagonist in the Truman Show, the Matrix or the 13th Floor trying to figure out what’s really going on.

Max Tegmark, The Universes of Max Tegmark

Christian Libertarianism, Consciousness, Paul

Minimalist Christianity

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Here’s a snippet of a conversation I had earlier today.

C: You’re a christian, so of course you believe in a disembodied consciousness.

Me: That’s a non sequitur.

C: You’ve got me beat then. I’ve never heard of God having a body before.

Me: Heard of Jesus? (John 1:14)

C: Well yes, but God was around before Jesus.

Me: Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden. (Genesis 3:8)

C: And that’s supposed to tell me what? That God had legs? God was the creator of the Universe, apparently, so he was around before there was any need for legs, before there even was legs.

I find it hard to get my head around the idea of a disembodied consciousness. I’m pretty sure that my consciousness can’t be disembodied and remain … conscious. As for the mind of God … I have absolutely no idea.

But I reprise this snippet of a conversation to make the point that the label ‘Christian’ makes people assume all sorts of unwarranted things. It gets annoying after a while. I’m not given to angry outbursts and acts of homicidal violence, but please don’t push your luck with, “You’re a Christian, so you must be a socialist!”

Anyway, in an apparent synchronicity, blogger Glenn Peoples posted an excellent post today on something he calls minimalist Christianity. Here are a couple of paragraphs (but do make sure to read the whole thing).

A number of times the Apostle Paul warned first century Christians about getting into foolish controversies over doctrine. This isn’t to say that they shouldn’t believe what they find most convincing about a whole range of things, but they were taking it further, making those things points of contention that threatened to divide the church. When writing to Timothy, a young church leader, Paul urged him no fewer than five times to stay away from – and to urge others to stay away from – unproductive quarrels over such things. But this is what really grabbed my attention recently, prompting this blog post: When Paul was in Athens preaching the Gospel, a number of philosophers asked him to come and speak to them because, here it comes, they wanted to know what the Christian faith was. They were accustomed to examining different worldviews but they had not yet heard of Christianity, so they said to Paul, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? For you bring some strange things to our ears. We wish to know therefore what these things mean” (Acts 17:19-20). Every evangelist and apologist reading this passage should be on the edge of their seat: They are about to get a bona fide New Testament example of what it actually looks like to sum up the Christian faith. And what does Paul say? I assume that Luke’s record is not intended to be verbatim, and only sums up what he thought was important (which in a way helps me to make the point even clearer). Here’s the whole talk as recorded in Acts 17

Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, ‘To the unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, for

‘In him we live and move and have our being’;

as even some of your own poets have said,

‘For we are indeed his offspring.’

Being then God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man. The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.

Every time I have made this observation, I have been met with almost immediate misunderstanding, so let me labour the point: Nothing that I have said here implies that Christians should believe as few things as possible – or even that it’s a good thing to only believe the bare essentials. I think holding a lot of bad theology is bad for you. It has “knock on” effects into other things you believe and do. When I talk about theology at the blog and podcast, hopefully I make it obvious that I do care about what I believe – and what others believe too – beyond the bare essentials (just as a dietician cares about what you eat beyond the bare necessities needed to keep you alive). There is much growth, intellectually, spiritually and practically, in moving beyond the bare essentials of Christian thought and into the riches of biblical theology. But I have become convinced of this: The acceptance of the Christian faith does not require that anyone shares your convictions (however important they might be to you) on everything you believe that you have found among those riches.

The post in its entirety is well worth reading. Thanks, Glenn.

Here’s some further reading.

I am a Christian
Jesus, Jesus, what’s it all about?
Contentious Christians (exploring the faith)
What if I strongly disagree? … (explorefaith.org)
Christian Agnosticism (Beliefnet Forums)

P.S. Don’t expect Paul’s advice not to get into “foolish controversies over doctrine” to be taken much notice of around here!

Intellectual Property, Philosophy, Property

Two women wearing the same dress

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Two women wearing the same dress is sometimes a criminal matter.

Two blondes, one dress – a recipe for a catfight

Drinks were thrown and blood was spilt when two blondes clashed in a bar about who looked best in a silver dress, a jury has been told.

Victoria Clapham, 22, wore the dress on a night out in central Wellington late last year. It was given to her by her friend Matthew Vibert and his mother – but she says she did not know he had previously given it to another woman.

Its first owner, Bridget Masters, 20, was Mr Vibert’s former girlfriend, and sparks flew when the two blondes crossed paths in the toilets at the former Temperance Bar on November 28.

In Wellington District Court yesterday Ms Clapham denied telling Masters that the dress looked better on her. The dress is not an exhibit in court and was not photographed for the jury to see.

I Googled “two women wearing the same dress”.

I found this

and this

and this

but I couldn’t find a picture of two women wearing the same dress. The very same dress.

Your search – “two women wearing the very same dress” – did not match any image results.

In philosophy, we call the distinction between the same dress and the very same dress the type–token distinction.

the type–token distinction is a distinction that separates a concept from the objects which are particular instances of the concept. For example, the particular bicycle in your garage is a token of the type of thing known as “The bicycle.” Whereas, the bicycle in your garage is in a particular place at a particular time, that is not true of “the bicycle” as used in the sentence: “The bicycle has become more popular recently.”

You can own a bicycle (token). But you can’t own the bicycle (type). You can own an instance of a concept. But you can’t own a concept.

Advocates of so-called “intellectual property” would claim otherwise. They believe in patents. ‘Patent’ is basically a euphemism for a government granted and enforced monopoly. Were the government to grant you a patent on the bicycle, it would place a restriction on the freedom of everyone else to do what he wishes with his own property. (E.g., if you patent a bike, then that means I can’t use my steel and rubber to make my own bike!)

Concepts are mental entities. The ‘bicycle’ concept exists in the mind/brain of everyone who knows what a bicycle is. The ‘bicycle’ concept is part of me, and I claim ownership, because I claim self-ownership. You have a patent on the bicycle? Sorry, mate. Your freedom ends where my nose begins. On yer bike!

[Hat tip: David Peterson]

Consciousness, Free will, Freedom, Meta-ethics, Philosophy of Mind

Problem?

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A couple of days ago, columnist Joe Bennett concluded his column in The Press by telling us

I’m going to spend the afternoon finding out how I’ve chosen to enjoy myself.

You’re about to find out that you’ve chosen to read on to see what on earth Joe Bennett was talking about. Here’s the start of his column.

But first an apology. A month or so back a gentleman emailed me about something I’d said on the radio. He wrote, and I quote, “free will is a childish delusion”.

“Scoff,” I wrote back. “Pooh pooh. I have free will. My free will is writing this email. Without free will we are automata.”

Since then, however, I have been on a wee journey and I would like to retract my scoff and pooh pooh. But I have forgotten the gentleman’s name and deleted his email.

So if you’re reading this, sir, sorry. You were right. I was wrong.

The change of mind followed last week’s column about the mutiny of the body.

In response I got several emails directing me to some neuroscientific research. It seems that neuroscientists have been nibbling at the idea of free will for years without telling me.

For example they attached electrodes to people’s skulls and then asked the people to click a computer mouse at a moment of their choosing. The boffins found that when people decided to click the mouse, their brain had already begun the physical process of clicking. In other words, the decision to click had been made before the people realised they’d made it. The click was already going to happen.

There were numerous similar experiments. They all suggested that when we think we decide to do something of our own free will, our consciousness is merely catching up with a decision that we have already made. We are rationalising after the fact.

We are deluding ourselves into thinking we are in conscious control of our actions. It’s a nice, consoling delusion, but a delusion none the less.

Problem? Well, yes! If we have no free will, we have no moral responsibility for our actions.

No free will means that Christianity is a nonsense.

No free will means that Objectivism is a false religion.

No free will means that “not my problem” doesn’t cut it.

I’ve known of the experimental results to which Bennett refers for the past 15 years or so, ever since I read Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained. 15 years later, I still have no rejoinder.

Dennett takes us to a very high mountain and shows us all the sciences of naturalism and their splendour. “Everything you want … you can have,” says Dennett.

Consciousness, Monism vs Dualism, Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind

Dualism

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There are two kinds of people in the world, those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don’t.

Also known as Benchley’s Law of Distinction, this quote is due to Robert Benchley, US actor, author, and humourist (1889 – 1945). Benchley was a dualist.

Benchley was a dualist about kinds of people, but you can be a dualist about anything. “There are two kinds of …” Just fill in the dots.

Dualism usually refers to dualism in the philosophy of mind and it usually refers to substance dualism (also known as Cartesian dualism).

In philosophy of mind, dualism is [a view] about the relationship between mind and matter, which claims that mind and matter are two ontologically separate categories. In particular, mind-body dualism claims that neither the mind nor matter can be reduced to each other in any way, and thus is opposed to materialism in general, and reductive materialism in particular. Mind-body dualism can exist as substance dualism which claims that the mind and the body are composed of a distinct substance, and as property dualism which claims that there may not be a distinction in substance, but that mental and physical properties are still categorically distinct, and not reducible to each other. This type of dualism is sometimes referred to as “mind and body” and stands in contrast to philosophical monism, which views mind and matter as being ultimately the same kind of thing. …

If you think that mind can be “reduced” to matter (as I do) then you are not a dualist, you are a monist. If you think that matter is made of mind (as Tim does) then you are also not a dualist, you are a monist. Either way, you think that, ultimately, there is only one kind of stuff of which man’s mind is made.

Descartes, after whom Cartesian dualism is named, is famous for the phrase, ‘I think, therefore I am.’ There’s another phrase he used in Meditations on First Philosophy. It is ‘clear and distinct idea.’

Furthermore, my mind is me, for the following reason. I know that I exist and that nothing else belongs to my nature or essence except that I am a thinking thing; from this it follows that my essence consists solely in my being a thinking thing, even though there may be a body that is very closely joined to me. I have a clear and distinct idea of myself as something that thinks and isn’t extended, and one of body as something that is extended and does not think. So it is certain that I am really distinct from my body and can exist without it.

‘Clear and distinct’ is on a par with ‘self-evident’. An idea that’s clear and distinct to one person may be unclear and indistinct to another. And I don’t think much of Cartesian dualism. But I mention this phrase because it summarises two things (there are others) I think every philosopher should aspire to.

(1) Being clear.
(2) Distinguishing between distinct things.

This post is apropos of nothing in particular.