How to prove that GOD exists from a scientific point of view?

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

Isn't that the mechanical part? Is that the full picture of Life? I don't think so.

What more do you see beyond complex mechanisms working together?

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

Isn't that just another correlation like neurons and consciousness. If we already know that the brain correlations are insufficient as they don't explain consciousness how is behavior different.

Not sure what your point is - the adaptive benefit of consciousness consists of the conscious behaviours that provide a selective advantage. An explanation or mechanism for consciousness is not directly relevant to that.

Behavior doesn't explain consciousness as its about a subjective experience. For every experience there is going to be different behavior. The conscious experience of say Dark side of the moon lol now that's a trip is not going to equate with the behavior of the picking of guitar strings, playing of synths and the behavior of band members or anyone sitting at home listening.

Again, I'm not sure what your point is - who said that behaviour explains consciousness?

I can't make sense of what you said about DSOTM, but not every subjective experience necessarily produces a different behaviour. With music, tracks can produce very different experiences but (particularly if they have the same rhythm or tempo) the resulting behaviour may be indistinguishable; intense amusement and grief can appear behaviorally indistinguishable; etc.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

I would have thought spacetime would be the most important and foundational ingredient as nothing else can happen. But then how do we get spacetime.

No one knows - but there are plenty of ideas. Emergence from something more fundamental is an increasingly popular idea, e.g. quantum entanglement. Most fundamental of all would be some ontological brute fact.

 

[stevevw]

Reports of the experience of love? How is that going to work? Sure, you can get Person A to say, "Yes, I experienced the emotion I call love," and you can get Person B to say, "Yes, I experienced the emotion I call love," but there's no way to objectively verify that what A calls love is the same as what B calls love, since the love they feel is subjective, not objective, and short of reading their minds, there's no way to actually compare the two.

But that is exactly how science works. Scientist claim there is such a thing called 'matter' out there beyond our minds but there's no way to get outside our minds to check if this is actually the case. So basically we all subjectivity agree despite not being able to get inside another persons head to see if they actually agree. Sort of like mass hallucination.

That's seems to be the same as you just describe about why we cannot measure love. But the same logic applies. We all agree there is such a thing called love. We know its real and has a real effect on us and the world. We can't get inside another person to check if they do believe love is real but we all agree its real nevertheless. That's despite 'Love' being transcendent and cannot be verified.

I mean we go to war over love and kill with hate. I reckon their way more a power force in the universe than any physical reaction lol. We see its influence around us every minute of the day.

Our conscious experience is all we have to know reality. Everything is subjective even the idea that we can make some independent measuring system that will measure the world objectively because we don't really know if there is an objective world out there because we keep getting in the way.

I think we create reality by the choices we make and what we choose to know.

 

[stevevw]

No one knows - but there are plenty of ideas. Emergence from something more fundamental is an increasingly popular idea, e.g. quantum entanglement. Most fundamental of all would be some ontological brute fact.

Yeah entanglement what did Einstein call it 'Spooky action at a distance'. I remember browsing over some article about an experiment with cells acting at a distance. I will try and find it. It fascinates me.

IMO I think the "ontological brute fact" has something to do with consciousness (Mind) being fundamental as that seems to be the one and only thing we can say is real because its direct, in our face if you like. All else are concepts of the mind including any idea of matter out there.

Mind and information seem to be the common basis for all domains and would explain a lot of Hard to explain stuff quickly and simply.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

Sorry meant to say consciousnesses is non falsifiable.

Claims about the evolution of consciousness are falsifiable - you just have to demonstrate that it has some other origin or that it couldn't have evolved in the way that is claimed.

To develop a theory of consciousness you have to explain what its intrinsic nature is.

Define 'intrinsic nature' and give some examples. People have explained what they think consciousness is in many different ways - are they explaining its intrinsic nature?

All we know at the moment and I think all we can ever know is that consciousness is of a qualitative nature. So there's an explanatory gap between the quantitative measures and qualia.

The issue of qualia always reminds me of The Goon Show, where Seagoon opens the door to a basement cellar and finds Eccles.
Seagoon: "Eccles, what are you doing down there?"
Eccles: "Well, everybody gotta be somewhere..."

I think the same idea applies to qualia - if you are to assign the salient sensory features of the world to your internal model so that they are appropriately and usefully distinguishable, you must represent them somehow. Those representations (perhaps particular patterns of activity in particular clusters of neurons) are what the model consists of, and constitute our phenomenal experience (which we philosophically dissect into qualia), but it doesn't seem meaningful to me to ask why our phenomenal experience is like that; it is what it is, i.e. it has to be like something.

I don't think that explains a theory of consciousness as its just more correlations. We don't even know what consciousness is. If a degree of consciousness is present in all living things and scales up with more complex beings then consciousness is an ongoing increasing awareness like we are waking up to ourselves and the universe.

All theories depend on correlations between model and observation. You need a reasonably well-defined concept of consciousness independent of humans before you can talk of degrees of consciousness in living things in general.

"... then consciousness is an ongoing increasing awareness like we are waking up to ourselves and the universe." A rather romantic (even teleological) alternative to 'maintaining a selective advantage in an increasingly complex social environment'

Evolution wise I think it comes down to the central role of the subject as an agent who is able to direct their own evolution and I think Neo Darwinism has a problem with that. It takes a deterministic view and relegates all behavior to genes and natural selection whereas conscious experiences transcends that.

Neo-Darwinism is ill-defined. There is no consensus on what it means. If you mean the 'modern synthesis', there are a number of contemporary variations that extend its scope in different ways. That's how science works - the groundwork is established and then ideas are elaborated to encompass and explain more phenomena.

Like in QM the subject is central to how the world opens up and the materialist view has a problem with explaining that so it explains it away.

Nope, not like QM at all.

That's because consciousness cannot be reduced to objective measurements its a different stuff. The best I think the a quantitative theory can do is to say that consciousness is some mystical phenomena that emerges from physical processes. But that's almost the same as saying God did it except life itself has done the creating.

No; scientific theories don't deal in 'mystical phenomena'. Consciousness is emergent and as yet unexplained, but that doesn't make it mystical. Saying, 'God did it' and saying, 'life (evolution) created it' are very different things.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

Just because a phenomena does not do what you wish, does not discount it,

Parnias is nothing like the largest. But the numbers are instructive.

In parnias study of 2000 cardiac arrests only 140 survived, that yielded 100 interviews, 9 NDE of which two had experiences with potentially verifiable details NEITHER of which occurred in a place where there were targets, only one was well enough to investigate further and the details of what was observed during clinical death , did match what actually took place. So 100% on a minute sample.

The problem is Its incredibly rare - only two examples from thousands of cases give a problem for normal research methods.

It surprised me just how fatal cardiac arrests still are, despite our technology and few if any occur in places where “ targets” were placed the numbers are meaningless.

So the target experiment failed to yield ANY examples on which ANY conclusion can be drawn. Because Most arrests do not occur in convenient places.

The biggest is actually van lommels study

A longitudinal study, of 344 survivors. His bigger numbers allow him to draw many conclusions in which using control groups he demonstrates no normal bilological or pharmacological process can account for them . Indeed they are not correlated to any patient, beliefs or treatment characteristic. Except apparently young age.

He estimates 18% of recoverers have had an NDE.

So Read van pommels hbook. Or his articles in lancet.
And bellgs.
And the “ the self does not die” a compendium of veridical experience.

Of course death is not rare, and in world history terms , neither is recovery or NDE. But the proportion makes it nearly impossible to do controlled experiments.

The numerous veridical experiences demonstrate that consciousness is not just a function of the brain. Only ONE validated experience is enough to prove that.
The witnesses were in the main ED , cardiology and surgical staff. So the witnesses are indeed credible.

Many such staff dare not speak of such things for fear of being ridiculed.

On veridical experience. The patients cannot have known what they describe of consciousness were confined to the brain. Even Blind patients have seen for the first time!

Science always has had a problem dealing with the long tail, what is rare or cannot be repeated at all. That’s a limitation of science. It can only deal with repeatable things. It has no real idea what consciousness is.

Indeed van lommel - a cardiologist- researches neurology and why increasingly neurologists are accepting the mind is not just a function of the brain for many reasons, not just NDE eg neuroplasticity.

Van lommel suggests non locality of quantum effects as a place to start looking for answers.

The problems with veridical experiences are establishing that the brain is inactive (EEG is not sufficient), establishing the exact context and timing, and verifying the report.

It seems to me that statistically, given the large number of 'clinical death' occurrences from which recovery is made, the stressful and traumatic circumstances of such an occurrence for all involved, and the tendency for exaggeration and confabulation between events and the report, it is not surprising that a few apparently inexplicable cases are reported. I've read a number of attempts to verify such stories which have discovered the circumstances were not exactly as claimed, that what was claimed as impossible to have known was, in fact, possible to have known, and where recollections of individuals involved differed.

What does Van Lommel think QM non-locality has to contribute? It requires entanglement, which means a common origin for the entangled particles, it is extremely sensitive to environmental influences, and cannot transmit classical information. Sounds like quantum woo.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

Yeah entanglement what did Einstein call it 'Spooky action at a distance'. I remember browsing over some article about an experiment with cells acting at a distance. I will try and find it. It fascinates me.

Entanglement doesn't permit communication (no-communication theorem).

IMO I think the "ontological brute fact" has something to do with consciousness (Mind) being fundamental as that seems to be the one and only thing we can say is real because its direct, in our face if you like. All else are concepts of the mind including any idea of matter out there.

Mind and information seem to be the common basis for all domains and would explain a lot of Hard to explain stuff quickly and simply.

OK. So how would it 'explain' anything? an example would be helpful.

 

[Mountainmike]

The problems with veridical experiences are establishing that the brain is inactive (EEG is not sufficient), establishing the exact context and timing, and verifying the report.

It seems to me that statistically, given the large number of 'clinical death' occurrences from which recovery is made, the stressful and traumatic circumstances of such an occurrence for all involved, and the tendency for exaggeration and confabulation between events and the report, it is not surprising that a few apparently inexplicable cases are reported. I've read a number of attempts to verify such stories which have discovered the circumstances were not exactly as claimed, that what was claimed as impossible to have known was, in fact, possible to have known, and where recollections of individuals involved differed.

What does Van Lommel think QM non-locality has to contribute? It requires entanglement, which means a common origin for the entangled particles, it is extremely sensitive to environmental influences, and cannot transmit classical information. Sounds like quantum woo.

You are correct those are the questions,
Now study the specific incidents.
They pass , with flying colours.
None of those explanations work.

There are many. The witnesses are medical and sceptical so they asked and discounted all the same questions.

On timing ,( eg) some witness difficulties with their own defibrillation , long after the cardiac arrest, consciousness is lost after seconds , some are actual flatline ECG. Medical Consciousness did not reappear till later.

To give an idea of a specific case. Another when all blood was drained from brain to operate a brain stem aneurism and deliberately held hypothermic whilst ECG was monitored flat. Ears plugged , loud noises , and eyes taped. Yet she saw what they did , even though she did not expect any of it.

They witness places and conversations and actions they cannot possibly have seen or guessed at from the vantage point , so conscious or not , the brain cannot be the source.

All I can suggest is read them

As for lommel he doesn’t pronounce an explanation, there is none.
He looks at all the medical factors , pharmacology, treatment, background, correlating factors and comes to the conclusion there are none.

He does note many eminent physicists comments on non locality and subjectivity So suggests it as a place to start looking.

But the lack of explanation doesn’t invalidate the evidence they happened.

All I can suggest is read the books I suggested. Start with bellg, then self does not die, then van lommel which has masses of medical background, and trials detail,

 

[dlamberth]

What more do you see beyond complex mechanisms working together?

An infant smiling and giggling with happiness and glee in response to a mothers play.

 

[SelfSim]

IMO I think the "ontological brute fact" has something to do with consciousness (Mind) being fundamental as that seems to be the one and only thing we can say is real because its direct, in our face if you like. All else are concepts of the mind including any idea of matter out there.

Mind and information seem to be the common basis for all domains and would explain a lot of Hard to explain stuff quickly and simply.

OK. So how would it 'explain' anything? an example would be helpful.

@stevevw: The argument that mind, (and information), explains many observations, is well evidenced. The issue I see however, is when you then completely overlook the role of your own mind's consciousness when concluding that consciousness therefore, 'exists in the universe, truly independently from your own mind' (not saying you specifically used this phrase but I think its the basis of your overall argument?).. the latter of which, is a pure belief. Ie: we can see its just your own mind coming up with that latter 'add-on' part of your argument.

@FrumiousBandersnatch: (Nice to see your posts again). The instant @stevevw responds to your request for an explanation, we will be easily able to observe his mind in action in coming up with that explanation (which then serves as a demonstration of his above point).
The problem I've always had with your well considered argument, is the mysterious quantum leap you take in asserting that the evolutionary explainable mechanism for consciousness, (ie: complex physical/chemical brain processes), somehow exists truly independently from our minds .. the latter of which, (underlined), is exactly the same pure belief assumed by @stevevw's(?)

 

[SelfSim]

An infant smiling and giggling with happiness and glee in response to a mothers play.

.. observations, (fair enough) .. but hardly revealing explanatory models for those observations.

 

[dlamberth]

.. observations, (fair enough) .. but hardly revealing explanatory models for those observations.

I know. It's those observations though that points toward something about life that goes beyond explanatory models. That's why I used the term "mystery".

 

[SelfSim]

I know. It's those observations though that points toward something about life that goes beyond explanatory models. That's why I used the term "mystery".

Circular argument.
That which 'goes beyond explanatory models', is your model(!) because I can clearly see evidence of your mind creating that as your meaning for what 'a mystery is' (and then applying 'mystery' as a parameter of your model for 'what life is'). Circular.

 

[dlamberth]

Circular argument.
That which 'goes beyond explanatory models', is your model(!) because I can clearly see evidence of your mind creating that as your meaning for what 'a mystery is' (and then applying 'mystery' as a parameter of your model for 'what life is'). Circular.

Well...what ever. Word play.

All I know is that as mentioned previously in the observation of an infant smiling and giggling with happiness and glee in response to a mothers play, there's something way more going on there than a bunch of matter mechanics. I have no idea what it is, but I trust what I see and experience. It's not at all hidden.

 

[stevevw]

Fields are fundamental, not energy. Particles are just quanta of the fields.

As far as I understand fields have fluctuating energy/

What on earth do you think "matter" is? I can't really tell given the way you dismiss the existence of matter repeatedly in your posts.

I don't know what is matter. All I know is at the fundamental level there is no matter as understood from the billiard ball schema. Its just fields of fluctuating energy.

Oh, good grief. Not this again.

lol why not it seems to be a common theme among many physicists and philosophers of science and seems to fit what we are finding.

 

[Hans Blaster]

As far as I understand fields have fluctuating energy/

Well that's vague...

I don't know what is matter. All I know is at the fundamental level there is no matter as understood from the billiard ball schema. Its just fields of fluctuating energy.

This "billiard ball schema" you are obsessed with is just a 19th century version of ancient Greek "atomism".

The whole "wave/particle" duality thing (discovered about a century ago) is sorted out by realizing that the waves are the fundamental property and the "particle" nature is just the separation of individual quanta of the fundamental field that *behave* sometimes like particles.

I'm sorry reality isn't like you want it to be. (OK, not that sorry.)

lol why not it seems to be a common theme among many physicists and philosophers of science and seems to fit what we are finding.

You literally keep posting the same SciAm article. It isn't evidence.

 

[stevevw]

Claims about the evolution of consciousness are falsifiable - you just have to demonstrate that it has some other origin or that it couldn't have evolved in the way that is claimed.

The basic problem I think is that the "some other origin" in a deterministic model that reduces everything to material mechanisms doesn't work no matter what origin is postulated because conscious experience is not reducible to material mechanisms itself.

You can't explain the experience of love or beauty by physical processes. There's a mismatch in the type of phenomena we are trying to understand.

Define 'intrinsic nature' and give some examples. People have explained what they think consciousness is in many different ways - are they explaining its intrinsic nature?

Intrinsic nature is what something really is or is 'in itself'. Not what its correlated with. For example we could describe the physical behavior of love. It correlates with brain activity, people behave in certain ways. But none of that explains what love is in and of itself.

The issue of qualia always reminds me of The Goon Show, where Seagoon opens the door to a basement cellar and finds Eccles.
Seagoon: "Eccles, what are you doing down there?"
Eccles: "Well, everybody gotta be somewhere..."

I think the same idea applies to qualia - if you are to assign the salient sensory features of the world to your internal model so that they are appropriately and usefully distinguishable, you must represent them somehow. Those representations (perhaps particular patterns of activity in particular clusters of neurons) are what the model consists of, and constitute our phenomenal experience (which we philosophically dissect into qualia), but it doesn't seem meaningful to me to ask why our phenomenal experience is like that; it is what it is, i.e. it has to be like something.

But its that 'something like' that we cannot explain. Attributing certain physical activities to a phenomena that transcends physical activity is like saying if we build a machine with certain configurations it will produce a spirit.

There's an explanatory gap between what mindless matter and animated matter in the form of conscious experience which cannot be reduced to those mechanisms even if there is a certain arrangement of those mechanisms.

All theories depend on correlations between model and observation. You need a reasonably well-defined concept of consciousness independent of humans before you can talk of degrees of consciousness in living things in general.

The problem is unlike other phenomena which can be isolated within a material conception consciousness cannot. Consciousness is the human and cannot be separated out. \

To do that would mean ignoring what the human is directly saying about consciousness and attributing a secondary association which only describes how someone conscious behaves. Which is subjective anyway.

"... then consciousness is an ongoing increasing awareness like we are waking up to ourselves and the universe." A rather romantic (even teleological) alternative to 'maintaining a selective advantage in an increasingly complex social environment'

Romantic as it may sound it is still a quality of consciousness. Epistemology dictates our ontology and how we choose to know is a conscious subjective determination which determines our awareness of reality.

Neo-Darwinism is ill-defined. There is no consensus on what it means. If you mean the 'modern synthesis', there are a number of contemporary variations that extend its scope in different ways. That's how science works - the groundwork is established and then ideas are elaborated to encompass and explain more phenomena.

But basically its still about genes and NS. Creatures adapt to environments due to forces acting on bodies through a blind and random process. The creature itself is passive, has no agency and control over whats happening.

Nope, not like QM at all.

There are interpretations of QM that make the observer central. Wheeler's 'Participatory Anthropic Principle' for example.
https://futurism.com/john-wheelers-participatory-universe/

Or Harry Stapp who worked with Einstein.
Mechanics and the Participating Observer he summarizes his research (Stapp 2011). In essence (Stapp 2011, p. 160):

Quantum mechanics is a causal structure that joins the epistemological and ontological aspects of nature together in a rationally coherent dynamical reality. Knowledge and the acquisition of knowledge become integral parts of the process of creating the evolving universe! The acquisition of knowledge does not simply reveal what is physically fixed and settled; it is part of the process that creates the reality that we know.
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-03633-1_14

[/quote] No; scientific theories don't deal in 'mystical phenomena'. Consciousness is emergent and as yet unexplained, but that doesn't make it mystical. Saying, 'God did it' and saying, 'life (evolution) created it' are very different things.[/QUOTE] It is the same as saying some mystical phenomena emerge from inanimate matter. There is noting in mindless matter that can account for some qualitative phenomena. No explanatory bridge so it can only be postulated that somehow a machine can produce a ghost like quality that material mechanisms cannot create.

The problem is the material explanation wants to reduce our conscious experience that we are more than out mechanisms is mechanisms. To do that we have to make out any sense of self, of meaning and agency is an illusion. Yet the strength of consciousness as a qualitative force transcends this in some many ways its impossible to reduce it to matter without denying our own minds.

 

[Astrid]

Well...what ever. Word play.

All I know is that as mentioned previously in the observation of an infant smiling and giggling with happiness and glee in response to a mothers play, there's something way more going on there than a bunch of matter mechanics. I have no idea what it is, but I trust what I see and experience. It's not at all hidden.

Do you think an atheist cannot feel as much and as deeply as you.

 

[Astrid]

I know. It's those observations though that points toward something about life that goes beyond explanatory models. That's why I used the term "mystery".

Explanatory models have their place.
They are great for understanding wave action
say,
Of course they cannot address the awe of standing on
a sea cliff and experiencing the
mighty surf from a distant typhoon.

But why divert your gaze to some ineffable "Beyond
that you will never find, when all the wonder and mystery is
crashing on the rocks right there below your feet?

That is a mystery to me, why people do that,