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the truth is I have called arguments insane....but that has to do with you all reinventing what I said and trying to force me to defend the new version that is in direct opposition to what I said and believe.
Wow, how many ways do you want me to say it -- I just keep repeating myself.
How do you know that the mind stops when the brain does? You assume a person in a coma is just asleep and without consciousness. He could be roaming around out of his body. Out of body experience has been recorded and verified by doctors who operated on patients, claimed they were dead or in a coma and the person floated above their bodies, heard their conversations and repeated them verbatim. Since you aren't a believer try something - Ask God to give you a tiny glimpse of Hell ... just for a couple seconds. That would change your mind, if you suddenly woke up screaming in horror. ??? Or Heaven.
personally, I find a glimpse of God Himself to be far more convincing but yes....
If mind was truly independent of the body, everyone would have OBEs or continuous consciousness, every time, and no-one would think it particularly unusual, whereas in practice it's only one or two percent and it is considered unusual. Multiple lines of evidence are consistent with the mind being what the brain does.
Lol; Let God do it's worst - I've had nightmares from figments of the imagination before - although I rarely get them these days, usually if I'm too hot
Sooner or later you can expect a coincidence or a near coincidence that will have them claiming they were right all along... confirmation bias.
I think what the poster is trying to say is that all the parts of man are intertwined yet separate, that is how we can have different parts to talk about but still only have one man....kind of like the heart is not the brain but without the heart and the brain both you don't have a functioning person. You know, that idea...If mind was truly independent of the body, everyone would have OBEs or continuous consciousness, every time, and no-one would think it particularly unusual, whereas in practice it's only one or two percent and it is considered unusual. Multiple lines of evidence are consistent with the mind being what the brain does.
I notice you haven't addressed the other points I made; specific damage or interference with the brain can significantly change character, opinions, emotions, sense of self, etc., all the recognised elements of mind and consciousness, in specific ways. How can that be if mind is independent of brain?
Lol; Let God do it's worst - I've had nightmares from figments of the imagination before - although I rarely get them these days, usually if I'm too hot
most christians I know think it is the prophecies fulfilled that testify to the truth of what they believe, not the ones that are yet to be fulfilled. Just saying, many non christians try to insist it is backwards from what they truly believe.
How did I distinguish belief from delusion?...I don't know, but did it matter? No.
Personally, I interpreted the OP question to be talking about after we believe something, but I totally love this analogy about getting to the belief...How does one distinguish a 'belief' from a delusion?
I'm reminded of the time I was hunting until late evening.
Go to the edge of farmers cleared fields, hit the tree line of forest that borders the river, step in and it's a whole different darker world of Fl cypress river bed. Absolutely enchanting, and worth digressing to describe.
Anyway, once in, I always just headed to the left to wherever. There was a trail coming in from the woods but that soon would fade to nothing heavily traveled or worn in from high traffic. It gets late, too late. The blood curdling evening call of the huge owls that always let me know it's time to get out of there have long past. I can see no trail, no landmarks, pretty much nothing, and I DO NOT want to spend the night there. I just figure I was still headed in the right direction because that was the direction I was headed in when it got to dark to discern where I was. I'm looking, not seeing anything that consciously tells me anything about where I am...looking aimlessly and walking, got to get out before it's pitch black. I believe I'm headed in the right direction and also thinking it could easily be a delusion, but I have no time to stop and think about that, I just have to get out. I come out right where I came in, and not on the trail. I met the trail just as it opened to the field. Happy Happy!...singing "We're outta' the rain, we're outta the dark, we're outta' the woods!"
No solid idea how I did that to this day. Did God lead me out?...I doubt it, or only in that he made us like he did, and able to handle certain situations. Instinct? maybe, but what is that exactly? Was I seeing things, silhouettes of barely visible landmarks, or other clues that I wasn't conscious of seeing? Is that instinct, or is instinct something more? How does that cat that we stupidly let outside when we first move to a new place, find their way back to the old place, sometimes states away? They've never seen any of that terrain?
Whatever it is, and there may be logical explanations I don't know about, but just because we cannot distinguish how or why certain things are, or if they are, hardly means they aren't. IOW, sometimes "We just know" IS a viable explanation. We distinguish it by feelings, and there might very well be good reasons for those feeling, rendering them not actually just feelings at all, but we may not know exactly what the good reasons are. What is my proof? it happened to me and has probably happened to many in one form or another. Seeing solid result of not fully understood feelings is proof, or take the cat scenario, just to name a couple.
And don't get me wrong, I'm the last one to say we should just go by "feelings" when it comes to listening to ourselves and taking certain actions. Once we actually consciously start thinking and trying to logicate, we can mess things up thoroughly...Just as if I had stopped in the woods to try to figure out if I was wrong or right in how I was going about what I was doing, I'd a probably messed it up big time. I think, for whatever it's worth, a key there is not having time to think too deeply and mess it up with things that don't belong, just as we make split second right moves when we avoided that accident, that we might have never made had we stopped to think or had the time to stop to think. Do you realize how many split second right moves we have to make just to recover from tripping over something?...think about it...or on second thought best not or we end up flat of our @**. "Simple involuntary response...meh" but it's not all that simple, it's simply incredible, and darn near unexplainable how we do some things we do.
Though wide open for scrutiny from many angles, along with the fact, I far from fully understand it. I still think there is something to the fact that sometimes we don't have to know exactly how or why..."sometimes".
Alcohol does that, drugs as well. The integration of the mind and brain are complex, like mix a tsp of salt with a glass of water, two become one, yet you can separate them.
So your unwillingness to pray to God and give Him a the benefit of the doubt and then to top it off laugh it off ... not much more I can say to you. Bye.Lol; Let God do it's worst - I've had nightmares from figments of the imagination before - although I rarely get them these days, usually if I'm too hot
