Posts by slimboyfat

169

Universal sovereignty on trial

by Factfulness in

i just had a thought of clarity regarding the jw explanation for this doctrine.

they explain that satan challenged god regarding his right to rule.

god failed to prove his right to rule.

slimboyfat

Everything we know about the world is experienced through our consciousness, and that includes the material reality of the world around us. So it makes more sense to doubt the existence of the material world than it does to doubt our own consciousness.

What does it mean for consciousness to be an “emergent property” of the brain? As Hoffman says there is not really any scientific theory to account for this. Material and consciousness are apparently two different things and it is utterly mysterious how one relates to the other. It’s as if playing music somehow results in a lemon cake. It’s utterly unclear how the two things, the physical body and consciousness, are fundamentally connnected to each other.

I know that I exist as a conscious entity because I feel this directly. I only know about the material world second hand, through perception, and listening to others.

Maybe the material world does exist independently of us. But the other option is that the material world is an “emergent property” (again whatever that means) of our consciousness. It’s not how we normally view reality, but it’s not easy to say that a materialist basis of reality should necessarily be given priority over the view that consciousness is basic to reality and the material is a result of consciousness rather than the other way round.

169

Universal sovereignty on trial

by Factfulness in

i just had a thought of clarity regarding the jw explanation for this doctrine.

they explain that satan challenged god regarding his right to rule.

god failed to prove his right to rule.

slimboyfat

It becomes a bit clearer in this video. He believes the universe exists independently of our consciousness but not on a material basis. Rather the independent basis of the universe is the collective consciousness of all entities. In other words, presumably if there were no conscious agents then there would be no material universe.

https://youtu.be/pYe1bvz_7hQ

It makes sense to start with consciousness because the one thing we are sure about is that we are conscious. I am sure that I feel like I am sitting on a chair, for example. More sure about this than I am about the material reality of the chair itself. Materialism subverts this common sense view and seems to suggest that we should be more sure about the chair’s indepdenent existence than our own sensation of it. There does seem to be something wrong with that view of reality.

169

Universal sovereignty on trial

by Factfulness in

i just had a thought of clarity regarding the jw explanation for this doctrine.

they explain that satan challenged god regarding his right to rule.

god failed to prove his right to rule.

slimboyfat

No I don’t think Donald Hoffman thinks the material universe exists independently of consciousness. He argues that consciousness is the fundamental basis of reality. He says this explicitly a few times in the first few minutes of this video. But he admits there are many possibilities and he is pursuing one possibility.

https://youtu.be/Jv25EcaUQBo

His academic credentials appear impressive. Are you really confident you understand quantum mechanics and string theory better than he does?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_D._Hoffman

169

Universal sovereignty on trial

by Factfulness in

i just had a thought of clarity regarding the jw explanation for this doctrine.

they explain that satan challenged god regarding his right to rule.

god failed to prove his right to rule.

slimboyfat

I think there is growing support for the idea that consciousness is basic to the universe itself and does not just arise magically in the brain from nowhere. I am sympathetic to this idea.

169

Universal sovereignty on trial

by Factfulness in

i just had a thought of clarity regarding the jw explanation for this doctrine.

they explain that satan challenged god regarding his right to rule.

god failed to prove his right to rule.

slimboyfat

This supposes that physical material is the fundamental component of reality. This is the dominant view in our time, but it is not the only way of seeing the world. An alternative is the view that consciousness is fundamental and that we create the world through our perception.

https://youtu.be/n6-Q6seVViU

19

Accounts report at Circuit Assemblies to go away

by LevelThePlayingField in

i was at the regional convention and asked an elder why is that at the assemblies their is an accounts report but not at the conventions?

he said, well actually they got a letter and in it said that in a little while they will do away with the accounts report stating how much the assembly costs for the weekend and just go to donation basis like at the conventions.. my first thought was, "they will donate even less now.".

anybody else hear about such a thing?.

slimboyfat

It’s difficult to tell what they are up to because motives and competence may be at odds.

In a contest between greedy and stupid, it might just be that stupid won on this ocassion.

19

Accounts report at Circuit Assemblies to go away

by LevelThePlayingField in

i was at the regional convention and asked an elder why is that at the assemblies their is an accounts report but not at the conventions?

he said, well actually they got a letter and in it said that in a little while they will do away with the accounts report stating how much the assembly costs for the weekend and just go to donation basis like at the conventions.. my first thought was, "they will donate even less now.".

anybody else hear about such a thing?.

slimboyfat

Talk about shooting yourself in the foot. This would be madness.

In which case, yep, I suppose it is something they might do.

4

teaching books from 2012

by pepperheart in

in a city i was in yesterday in all 3 carts i went to they were giving away teaching books that were printed in 2012. what had they been doing with them for six years ?

?.

slimboyfat

Maybe they’ll have a few leaflets, contracted out to someone else. I think they’ll close their own printing fascilities entirely.

169

Universal sovereignty on trial

by Factfulness in

i just had a thought of clarity regarding the jw explanation for this doctrine.

they explain that satan challenged god regarding his right to rule.

god failed to prove his right to rule.

slimboyfat

How so?

Well, when we listen to Darwinian accounts of how humans got to stand up and be intelligent, they tend to focus on the proximal causes, like the need to adapt to this or that particular situation, plus sexual selection and so on. But it doesn’t tend to address the mind boggling number of junctures that even allow us to arrive at these crossroads in the first place, involving the precise laws of the universe, the way natural selection itself works, the very idea of selective pressures. Reality seems to be amazingly designed to result in a brain that can perceive the world around it.

How do we account for this? Some have proposed the idea that there is an infinite number of universes, and we inhabit the one where we can perceive the universe simply because we can’t exist in any of the other universes where such perception is not possible. This is an interesting idea, and not easy to rule out, but isn’t it unnecessarily complicated. Isn’t the simplest explanation for the universe appearing to be geared toward consciousness the idea that it was constructed in that way on purpose? The multiverse idea at least acknowledges that our consciousness is remarkable and requires some sort of remarkable explanation.

Simon Conway Morris is a scientist who writes on the inevitability of human type consciousness in our universe.

169

Universal sovereignty on trial

by Factfulness in

i just had a thought of clarity regarding the jw explanation for this doctrine.

they explain that satan challenged god regarding his right to rule.

god failed to prove his right to rule.

slimboyfat

Have you read the book?

Consciousness may be inevitable given the universe as it exists. The remarkable thing, or the mysterious thing, is that the universe exists in such as way that makes it inevitable in the first place. It’s like marvelling at the shape ginger bread come out of the mould. Someone might say: that’s not remarkable at all, of course ginger bread men come out ginger bread men-shaped, because the mould is that shape. But that’s the question. Why is the mould that shape. Why is the universe such that it produces consciousness?