I have a thesis.

[Preach]

Allow me to begin with a preface. This thesis is the product of my own creativity and a book I have just read, called "Quantum Psychology" (click the link to go to Amazon), which can best be described by one of the user comments on the Amazon page, which I thought was as intellectually written as the book itself:

This book is a MUST read for anyone wanting to start getting rid of the semantic spooks in their psyche. This undefinable book of wisdom that weaves a coherent thesis out of such diverse topics as semantics, psychology, physics, model agnosticism and subtle humor makes clear better than anything out there just how much our perceptions and behavior are controlled/influenced by embedded language biases.

Although similar ideas have been put forth by a lot of people, I insist that my thesis is my thesis, not someone else's, and you are free to purchase the book and read it if you think my newfound "wisdom" is not genuine, or otherwise, not of my making.



Although the analogy of a tripod has been abused to death so many times now that it aches me to even use it, I must, because I can't find a better one; a complete human being is so similar to a tripod that I can't find a better analogy to use. Regardless of religious beliefs and social bias, most every person in this world think of the previously mentioned "complete" human as two entities in one. When I say complete, I do not mean accomplished. To a Christian, a complete human being consists of a body and a soul. To a Buddhist (a religion I am ignorant towards, so don't get hung up on little details and read the whole context I'm saying) I think we are talking about souls moving freely in the materialistic world. Meaning you can be reincarnated as a firefly, a tiger or a human. Your soul remains, but your cast and karma decides what materialistic embodiment you are worthy of possessing. Again, I am ignorant towards Buddhism, but my impression is that such works Buddhism.

It's interesting that we choose to separate body and mind. Or soul, if you will. It's almost funny. Modern science, biology and chemistry more so than any other sub-genre of science, explains us a lot more about our behavior than we think. Each individual human being is self-centered. Even if you spend your lifetime helping homeless children, inside your head you are doing it for yourself. If you were fucking miserable while doing it, you would have done something else, such are humans. Not because I have observed it, but because any science book you read will tell you exactly the same thing. Any psychologist will tell you exactly the same thing. It's you against the world. As we grow, we learn and eventually, we find a place for ourselves in the world. Finding a place includes finding something to believe in, something to care for, something to hate. Since there are six billion people on this planet, living in different areas, having very distinctively different experiences throughout life, we humans tend to think we are special. I am not talking about us as a race, I am talking about each individual. No matter how many times people tell you to drive slow, you're never gonna take them serious until you have to face the consequence of not driving slow.

This feeling of being special is so typical for humans that no one should ever have to feel shameful about it. But then you have people who cry and bitch because they think they are the worst people in the world because they are selfish. Imagine if you filled a balloon with water. Much in the same way our society and the world situation changes, if you pull, push and stretch the balloon, it will change forms and shapes. There is one constant that always remains: The mass of the balloon is the same. The content is the same. Fill too much water into the balloon and it's eventually gonna blow. I think that is what's happening in the world today with overpopulation and lack of resources, but that's a different thread.

Here comes my thesis. It's nothing groundbreaking. I have not solved the great question about life. I expect no applauds. Either way, please keep reading. I believe the old way of separating body and mind is wrong. I mentioned a tripod earlier, and we're gonna get back to that now. Body and mind are two entities. So why do I say tripod? Because the old ideas of mind and body are wrong. By now, we know that if someone is angry, it is not because their unbanausic "soul" is upset. Every thought and emotion has a carnal equivalent event take place. If you are angry, your soul is not disturbed, your body is releasing substances to your blood that flows with your blood cells to the brain, affecting each and every brain cell. Certain substances like these cause certain parts of the brain to override the rest of the brain, so to speak. When you are angry, it's not just something that happens in your "soul".

The natural question to ask then, is, if your body is your body and your mind is heavily dependent on your body's organs, what, then, is consciousness? The ability to do the opposite of what both your brain and body is expecting and trying to force you to do? Here comes the tripod analogy. We do not just have body and mind. We have body, mind, and consciousness. The body takes care of the perfunctory mechanical processes in your body. The mind controls your emotions and impulses. I'm gonna get a little quantum physical here, but the consciousness is something else. It does not manifest as a physical thing. You can't emulate consciousness, you can not measure it.

This is something I would love to discuss here.

 

[Preach]

No? You fucking bastards, do you have any idea how long it took me to write that shit?

 

[masta247]

I took some time to read this, I respect that you put much more work writing this than readers to read it.

Your theory is right from one point of view but wrong from another.
Because nobody clearly said what is soul and there are many other thesis on it's existence that can't be proven. There are many religions, many sects and other faiths etc. and there's no way everybody will say "this is a soul".
For example for me - soul = individual personality, selfhood, consciousness - the fact that I feel that I am me. So soul consists of few things + something undescribable, that I just feel it's soul.
I know there's a part in brain probably responsible for that (don't know how is it called in English),
but even newest science can't proove how does it work.
People have serious car accidents etc. they are paralised, their brain is demolished, they don't remember anything but they still have that "soul" in them, they know they are the same person. And it's not just about random luck that the "soul-brain" part haven't been damaged.
I think body affects brain and brain affects soul but you still can make your own decisions, your psychics kinda affects what will you do, your past memories too but still you have your own choice, you may say it's affiliated with consciousness but no, it's something more.

There's just one thing that can kinda prove that the science is right - there are people in psychiatric hospitals who are forced to take really strong drugs that in a big way affect their brain.
Actually they kill consciousness but still they are alive and their instinct or the subconscious allows them to perform simplest tasks. They're even called "vegetables".

On the other hand spiritual people may say that consciousness
initiate soul - that soul is "off" without consciousness. Something like a deep sleep.

I really like Biology and stuff like that and I know there are many thesis on soul. There are thesis from scientistic point of view as well as supernatural thesis - the fact is probably both are equally wrong. Your opinion is based mostly on - which side are you on. In this case I'm in the middle.

IMO this subject is like depating whether there are alien life forms in our solar system or not.
First of all what do you mean by alien life forms - there still are unknown life forms on earth, then there are microbs even on mars, are they life forms? etc.
There's no one answer, I think most intelligent people has their own thesis on that whole idea and the more you read about the subject the more doubt you will have and you will be even more unsure. So in this thread there's no way to clearly state one true answer but there may be different thesis by different people (but I doubt anybody else here would like to debate)

I believe in soul, as well as perfecting your soul, but I also believe in scientific proofs so as I said I'm in between. There's still not enough materials to clearly decide what is the only right answer.

Everything you said in this thread is debatable, even that thing about selfishness - even if somebody doesn't believe in karma or anything, he just thinks - ok from now on I'll sacrifice my life to help others - he doesn't do it for himself, he just had that idea. He doesn't want to be rich, to have power etc. so he's not selfish. But on the other hand he decided to do so because he wanted to, it accomplishes him.

Everybody feel special, it's normal because everybody have their own consciousness that they are themselves, not anybody else. The fact that you know you are yourself, and the fact that you were in your body forever, you decide about only your future, you know just your thoughts and really only yourself forces you to think that way. I think most people are aware that they are just one of billions same people, and they only slightly differ if you look at it from scientific point of view (but humanistilcally everybody is totally different with even drastic extreme oppositives)
but they're individual because each has his own "soul" that decides about itself, you can't live somebody else's life - that's why you think you are - as you called it "special" which is not too acurate statement but let's leave it that way.

There are people who believe in science, there are people who believe in "something more" - spiritual. Nobody proven which is right or which is wrong as none is perfect. There are scintific observations that can't proove something that is clear for somebody spiritual and the other way around.
There's no better or worse. It's about which way will you choose to think.

 

[Jokerman]

consciousness is something else. It does not manifest as a physical thing. You can't emulate consciousness, you can not measure it.

That's right. And that's because consciousness is not a thing; it's a process. The best way to think of this is not to think of the mind as a thing, some sort of entity that may or may not be separate from the body, but rather to think of human beings as having mental capacities. And so people have the capacity to think. They have the capacity to act, to feel, and to be conscious. All these mental capacities I classify as the mind.

The big question is how do these mental capacities that we have relate to the physical world and our physical bodies. The puzzle is how can something have effects in a physical world if it's not physical itself? How can anything like this brain give rise to conscious experience?

Some neuroscientists have said that we can identify conscious experience or correlate it with some particular kind of brain activity. But that presupposes that consciousness is one phenomenon, and I don't think it is. And so we won't solve the problem of consciousness by looking into the brain.

I think we need to study the phenomenology of consciousness. Phenomenology is the study of appearances. If we don't believe in a Cartesian soul or that there is something apart from the material world, then we have to find some way of integrating all our knowledge of the material world in a way that removes the mystery. I think the questions that we're asking about consciousness result from confusion rather than ignorance. We need to unpick those confusions and unravel them.

 

[Bender]

There is no experiencer; only the experience!

The consciousness is the sum of senses, feelings and emotions. It is dependant on both the body and mind. It is the state of being aware.

There I have solved your thesis, thankyou goodbye.

 

[Preach]

lol.

Anything that exists can be encapsuled. You are saying consciousness is a state of awareness, a sum of everything you are able to pick up.

If you look into quantum physicists' theories, like Bell's theorem, you will understand why i'm making this thread. I copied this very simplificated explanation of an experiment of his from here:

It is possible to construct a "filter" that selects only spin-up electrons. Again the details of what is in the box are not important for our purposes.
What is important here is that one-half of the electrons from the electron gun will emerge from the filter with the same speed in the same direction as before they entered the box, and one-half of the electrons will not emerge. Which is the case for an individual electron is random.

Quantum physics is a science that is derived from what scientists didn't observe during experiments. It is the "best" explanation for how quantum particles smaller than an atom work together. Quarks, neutrons, electrons, etc. I'm just laying down the groundrules for anyone reading this.

Each nucleon can be characterized either by their spin or their charge. The core of an atom consists of a proton and a neutron. One has a positive charge, the other has a negative charge.

Now further into his experiments and theorizing, using quantum physics, Bell was able to "prove" that if the one electron shot into space by the electron gun had an upwards spin, a corresponding electron left in the filter will have an opposite spin. Now if quantum physics, and to some extent physics are correct, if the projected electron should ever change it's spin to the opposite, the corresponding electron will do exactly the same thing. He was able to "prove" that this happened instantly disregarding distance. I put it in exclamation marks because this is a theory, not a fact, but it is a highly intriguing theory that many physicists and quantum physicists agree with. Essentially, his theory suggests that either there has to be a form of energy or interconnectedness between nucleons that have interacted that we can't fully fathom, or the laws of nuclear physics are faulty, or even worse, completely off base.

In the recent decades we have made tons of huge discoveries in the fields of electromagnetism and quantum physics. It's funny because Sign Related made a thread about Astral Projectors that made me think of this. Basically, there could be forces and energies unknown to us as we are only able to feel objects, and pick up light waves and vibrations in the air. We are not able to see heat waves, however, through technology humans have crafted devices that let us observe things that our human senses cannot. Who is to say there aren't more energy types and radiation types out there, more frequencies that we can't pick up, but that are there?

Or better yet, what if these energies do actually affect us. Through understanding how memories are really stored in the brain, physically, from a scientific point of view.. Well, in experiments where people have been exposed to electromagnetism while blindfolded and strapped to a chair, they described the experience as highly unpleasant. It didn't really hurt, it didn't really do anything other than make the testees feel bodily and mental discomfort.

Another quote from this site:

By using the closed circuit systems when studying living cells, the scientists of today reject the obligatory existence of magnetic fields with electric fields. Electricity and magnetism cannot be separated but are aspects of the one phenomenon of electromagnetism. The fact changing electric fields produce magnetic fields, and changing magnetic fields produce electric fields has been forgotten by the scientists studying living cells, thus the electromagnetic character of all living cells - human, animal, plants - is not understood. Wrong theories in biochemistry have caused the wrong conclusions resulting in normal physiological phenomena remaining "mysterious".

Now memory stored in your brain is an electromagnetic phenomenon. If two people are in an electromagnetic field where energy flows more or less freely, who's to say memories can't transfer across the field? This would explain people with sixth senses and supernatural abilities like mind reading. I have yet to see a person who can actually read minds, but the idea isn't too far out there.

You far from solved my thesis. If anything, you raise even more questions. Because with all this in the back of your mind, consciousness becomes something else completely. Now they ARE theories, but the further you look into them the more they will intrigue you probably. Unless you are religious, in which case I don't really feel like you should speak too much on the matter. Try explaining your own God first.

 

[Bender]

I thought you were trying to define what consciousness was philosophically. Then I thought you were being scientific talking in terms of psychology or physics. Now I just don't know what context your theorum is in, or being put across in.

If I were to add an anology to the situation It sounds like you are suggesting that the consciousness is the 'radio' of the human body and it is seperate from - but somehow involved with the mind.

 

[Preach]

Actually, I think I'm suggesting it's the guy listening to the radio lol.