patrick.net

Full disclosure. Roman Catholic. Active in my church.
So if there's bias to my worldview, so be it.

Not that you all care but at least you understand where in coming from.

No, there's no "creator", nor "architect".

I noticed in Florida people were "praying not to be hit by the coming hurricane"; didn't god make the hurricane too?

god and religion are inventions of man; the concept fills a need we have to believe "someone is watching over me."

I have a religious friend and she says my parents are watching over me; I tell her "If there is someone who would put in a good word for me, it's my mother. Maybe she's watching over me because I feel pretty lucky sometimes."

One of my favorites is people saying "my personal relationship with god."

In high school, I asked the smartest kid I knew, who happened to be Christian, for one thing that could not be explained by science. He said "consciousness".

I've been wondering about it ever since. What is consciousness exactly? Religious people say it's the same as the soul. The non-religious say it somehow evolved, but that doesn't really explain it. Even if consciousness is just part of nature, you can still imagine all kinds of possibilities that are not that different from the religious point of view. Maybe our kind of body is not strictly necessary, and some kinds of consciousness are part of physics, something Schroedinger proposed in his book "Mind and Matter". They could be trapped in kinds of hell, or in heaven.

I doubt that any traditional form of religion is entirely correct, because I can see them evolve over time by reading about them. Christianity picked up a lot from other cults of Roman times. There was an Egyptian cult of Isis the mother goddess, and a lot of the Catholic belief in Mary seems derived from that, and from the Greek cult of Artemis. And there are a lot of Jesus' sayings that are almost identical to those of Buddha from 300 years before. The Buddhists had sent missionaries as far as Egypt and Greece, though they were not successful.

I also suspect that the idea of God the father is just a leftover from the feeling we all have as toddlers that our own father is huge and powerful and watching out for us.

I'm also cynical because most religions are run like businesses, always trying to get more cash. Maybe the Amish don't ask their members for donations because they don't build churches, but I don't know of any other religions that don't always ask for more cash.

Having been a programer for a long time, I can imagine the universe as a great quantity of computer memory, where rules are set up for how the program runs, and any bits in memory could be flipped by the Great Programmer at any time, meaning that anything could happen, like miracles. Maybe everything is just information, meaning that stories and reality are not that different. That's already obviously true in a way. You can imagine something, and make it happen in reality. Things happen in reality, and become part of your memory.

But I can't get away from the fact that I cannot really explain my own consciousness. Or feelings. What are pain and pleasure?

Religion / faith is usually necessary for the functioning of a society, for multiple reasons:

1. Crime and punishment. In human history up to this point, most people are just not intelligent enough or stress-free enough to avoid committing crime and hoping to get away with it; e.g. office workers stealing office supply from their employers and government workers using government credit cards for personal benefits are rampant. Having a human bureaucracy large enough to make sure high enough percentage of crimes get punished would bankrupt the economy, so religions that have a godly watcher that doesn't have to be paid by the hour plus pension are useful for reducing crime among the average IQ or below population that have desires bigger than their productivity.

2. Ensuring contracts are executed faithfully. Similar to above but the execution of contracts often require action not just inaction.

3. Suppressing women, so they reproduce.

4. Making people humble so there is less conflict due to jealousy.

5. Making soldiers sleep better on the night before battle.

These are all very good and necessary functions to keep a society / civilization working. The downside is that then some opportunistic people use religions to conduct human-farming operations (promoting privileges to concentrate wealth then flip the script to have a revolution or having a new religion to kill the account holders, so the ponzi bankers never have to pay back the money they have conned people into depositing, essentially "pay me now and collect from God later, after I kill you"), and such operations are immensely profitable when the general population is gullible, becoming the existential danger to other smart people who are not into exploiting other human beings ruthlessly. That's why enlightenment and having an intelligent and skeptical (not necessarily skeptical of God but skeptical of earthly middlemen / government/religious-officials) general population is important for the safety of all humanity. BTW, the default religion is Faith-in-Government, which is essentially a very masochistic religion that would lead to being whipped by tyranny if pushed to its logical extreme and consolidated . . . as evidenced in the 20th century human history after the gate-keepers in the late 19th century promoted Nietzsche's idea "God is dead!"

Patrick says

In high school, I asked the smartest kid I knew, who happened to be Christian, for one thing that could not be explained by science. He said "consciousness".

If "consciousness" was some type of metaphysical, then it could not be affected by drugs, alcohol, or brain damage.

Maybe there's a core part to consciousness that remains the same regardless of conditions. Some book I flipped though once in a bookstore claimed that we experience pure consciousness only in dreamless sleep. But then, how do you know you experience something which leaves no memories?

Also, I could be falling into the "God of receding spaces" here, that is, backing off into smaller and smaller domains for the supernatural as more and more parts of life get explained by logic. Primitive Gods control the weather and earthquakes, then as those get explained, the Gods are invoked for a smaller problem space.

As I've said, I have no issue with religious people at all. Just worked 4 hours with a devoutly religious older gentleman (to me). We get a long just find and he know I'm not religious and doesn't push it.

Being a history major what I learned in history classes was religion has always been corrupt on multiple levels. No institution is immune from it. Hell this was a housing bust site and brokers were a big target (which is fine).

With religion you have tax free money every which way and that leads to corruption. It's fake caring, praying and all that stuff. If you think your Pastor, Priest, Nun, ect. actually cares about you, you're sadly mistaken. It's all a facade and I think most people understand this but think is some heaven and hell thing that was made up.

I won't dislike you for "believing" but just know it's not real. It's a formalized cult that the government doesn't tax because they do dirty work for the political class. They've been working together for centuries forever. They literally arbitrarily manipulated our dating system (years) from BC to AC based on a fictional character.

The educated made religion as a power grab. That's indisputable. It wasn't some wholesome idea. Get enough people to believe, and they did and it's just $$$$$$$$$ for them. They really don't care if you die. They're some of the best actors to be honest and they'll fuck your kids.

Patrick says

In high school, I asked the smartest kid I knew, who happened to be Christian, for one thing that could not be explained by science. He said "consciousness".

@Patrick here is something for you to look into if you're interested:

When you are 'put under' for surgery (unconscious) like me you may be surprised to learn that most (maybe all?) of the drugs they give you for this are basically inert. They don't hydrogen bond, they don't oxidize, they don't bond to cell receptors, they don't combine with other molecules to make new things.

So it's been a mystery for a long to as to how they work?

There has been some pretty cool research about this lately. In our nerve cells we have this tiny structures called microtubules (literally tubes) make from Tryptophan sub units.

Mostly from AI:

Tryptophan, an aromatic amino acid, plays a significant role in the quantum processes within microtubules, which are proposed to be involved in consciousness according to the Orch OR theory.

In a study published in 2024, researchers confirmed the occurrence of superradiance in networks of tryptophans within microtubules, a phenomenon that typically does not occur in warm and noisy environments. This finding suggests that quantum effects might underlie consciousness and could be influenced by anesthetics, which bind to the non-polar regions of tubulin, potentially affecting consciousness and memory. (When I saw the main guy studying this I don't recall him saying the drugs 'bonded'. He said they don't bond with anything if I recall but maybe I misunderstood about what happens in the tubes. Maybe they just prefer to hang out in the non-magnetic regions or something)

The Orch OR theory, proposed by Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff, suggests that consciousness arises from quantum processes in microtubules, involving objective reduction and orchestrated quantum computations.

As far as I know the testing in vitro showed that it blocked the quantum effects or maybe modified it a lot. I'm not a physics. But the study definitely showed an effect that was a big deal.

So in relation to this some scientists believe that consciousness is an emergent property of the universe. Like light.

Pretty trippy I think given that quantum effects in general are thought to happen in parallel universes vs. our-now. That's sort of the idea why quantum chips and qbits can solve problems so quickly that an classic computer wouldn't be able to do in the lifetime of our universe or some stuff like that. Big big numbers.

Thanks @Maga_Chaos_Monkey that's super interesting.

I wonder what the most primitive creatures with nerve cells are, and whether they have those same microtubules.

The earliest nervous systems are estimated to be nets in worm-like organisms or jellyfish. That's also around the time when photo-sensitive dots (the most primitive eyes) showed up likely after some animal incorporated photosynthetic gene fragments from plants, around the start of Cambrian Life Explosion. The arrival of the "eye" ( really photo sensitive dots like some jellyfish have, so can sense a predator's or prey's shadow) and nervous system may well have led to the vast increase of the number of species / variety of animal life (showing up in the fossile finds). BTW, most plants can sense and react to light.

Before then, as early as the single cell organisms, organisms were able to eat and move without nervous system, and able to move towards food and away from (chemical) harm.

Also, groups of ants seem to be able to solve problems without physically connected nervous network for the whole group; i.e. some kind of distributed computing while communicating between individuals using chemical scents and/or physical touching. For example, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VK4Kr7mQEUY

IMHO, pleasure and pain are evolved sensations usually benefitting the propagation of the genes. e.g. the preference for sweetness was due to in nature that taste is usually associated with precious simple sugar, a valuable energy source that is very rare in nature. With industrial sugar production, a strong preference for sweet taste would lead to diabetes. However, with government taxing the population that has more self-control through progressive income tax while issuing welfare to the population with less self-control, the result is Reverse Flyn-Effect starting a generation after the start of the welfare state.

Science is giving us more and more answers to questions that we did not know answer previously. However, still leaving room for God in the space that we don't yet have answer and can not know for certain (e.g. quantum uncertainty), and perhaps more importantly in time: there is nothing in science precluding God (whoever set this universe in motion, even if it's just the equivalent of his computer in his basement running a simulation) from intervening at any moment in the future.

"Microtubules are polymers of tubulin that form part of the cytoskeleton and provide structure and shape to eukaryotic cells."

So all cells with a nucleus seem to have microtubules, even plants. Maybe this would allow for some kind of plant consciousness.

Yes. There is way too much fine tuning both in physics and biology (the Cambrian Explosion bothered Darwin and has never been resolved), and a definite beginning. All points to a Creator.

Patrick says

I wonder what the most primitive creatures with nerve cells are, and whether they have those same microtubules.

I’d argue the use of the word primitive here is the key misunderstanding. What if all organisms alive today don’t have a common ancestor, but rather a common designer?

Therefore nothing is primitive, but rather a well designed organism capable of reproduction, and with enough genetic diversity built into it that it can actually lose diversity over thousands of years and still function nearly as good as its ancestors.

Just throwing this question out there being that this is a Religion & Philosophy thread:

All credible scientists agree that the Universe itself does not have an 'end,' that is, it goes on and on into infinity.

Being that the Universe is made up of an infinite amount of matter (which Einstein proved cannot be created nor destroyed, only altered), how then did the 'Big Bang' create something, out of complete nothing, into this unimaginable Universe that goes on into infinity?

Complexity does seem to be the sand in the gears of evolution theory. For example, the parasitic wasp that lays an egg in a particular species of caterpillar knows how to find that caterpillar and plant the egg internally. The hatched larva knows not to eat vital organs and secrets a chemical at the right time that stops the caterpillar from pupating into a butterfly. The larva then knows when to secrete a chemical that paralyzes the caterpillar and devours the rest just before the larva itself pupates into a wasp to fly off, find a mate, and repeat the cycle. Seems way too complex to just evolve, but then brings the question of what kind of monster would design such a system?

HeadSet says

Seems way too complex to just evolve, but then brings the question of what kind of monster would design such a system?

Sofia doesn't care about caterpillars and let the Demiurge run wild.

GreaterNYCDude says

Full disclosure. Roman Catholic. Active in my church.
So if there's bias to my worldview, so be it.

Not that you all care but at least you understand where in coming from.

GreaterNYCDude says

Is there a God / Creator / Architect of the Universe?

If yes.. does he care about his creation? Does he get actively involved in their affairs? Either regularly or sporadically?

Is there life after death? Is the soul eternal? What happenes when you die?

What are the positions of your church on these issues?

It just so happens, this is a book that I downloaded to my tablet and started to read it several nights ago. Covers a lot of ground as to who God is and how he interacts with his creation, etc.

Free PDF download from Internet Archive:

The Sovereignty of God by Arthur W. Pink

https://archive.org/details/TheSovereigntyOfGod_733

AmericanKulak says

Sofia doesn't care about caterpillars and let the Demiurge run wild.

I understand the "Demiurge" reference, but what is this about the capital of Bulgaria?

nobody can save you but
yourself.
you will be put again and again
into nearly impossible
situations.
they will attempt again and again
through subterfuge, guise and
force
to make you submit, quit and /or die quietly
inside.
nobody can save you but
yourself
and it will be easy enough to fail
so very easily
but don’t, don’t, don’t.
just watch them.
listen to them.
do you want to be like that?
a faceless, mindless, heartless
being?
do you want to experience
death before death?
nobody can save you but
yourself
and you’re worth saving.
it’s a war not easily won
but if anything is worth winning then
this is it.
think about it.
think about saving your self.
your spiritual self.
your gut self.
your singing magical self and
your beautiful self.
save it.
don’t join the dead-in-spirit.
maintain your self
with humor and grace
and finally
if necessary
wager your self as you struggle,
damn the odds, damn
the price.
only you can save your
self.
do it! do it!
then you’ll know exactly what
I am talking about.
~Charles Bukowski

HeadSet says

I understand the "Demiurge" reference, but what is this about the capital of Bulgaria?

Ha! Sophia is supposedly the REAL Ultimate Being, totally spirit and neo-Platonic Perfect Form in the Aether.

Only smelly unwashed people who read by candlelight/LED light in the basement can access this deep well of sekrit knowledge and are "Knowing" (Gnostic).

They Gnotice the ultimate reality!

No matter what it is, it always comes down to trying to find reasons not to obey the Moral Law, Ten Commandments, etc.

RE: Demiurge

Harlan Ellison's short story "The Deathbird" is a take on Gnosticism by an embittered, short, abrasive Jew about the end of days.