Val's kind summary of my post:
So to summarize:
1) You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about when it comes to psychiatric diagnosis, yet you attempt to incorporate erroneous premises into your argument.
2) You have absolutely no idea about neuroscience, yet you attempt to impression the uneducated with terms you heard on The Learning Channel and attempting to incorporate them with your lack of knowledge of psychiatry
3) Finally, you take all of this misinformation and bizarre premises and you conclude that "personality is seemingly greater than matter," which doesn't even need to be proven to begin with because it a) begs the question anyhow and b) nobody would object to the statement!
4) Your conclusion is absolutely 100% irrelevant to this thread!!!!
Behold. You have just witnessed the classic Christian logic in all its glory. This would definitely impress your Sunday School teacher, but not me or anyone else who actually thinks instead of opening wide as we are spoonfed with information.
Valsalva
1) You have no way of verifying that statement, and I disagree with your assessment that DID will vanish from the next DSM. By saying that personality is greater than matter, I am stating my belief that, once all of the physical, naturalistic elements are stripped away, there is still something there.
2) I freely admit I am not a neuroscientist. However, the apparent hubris you demonstrate is inappropriate. You really know nothing about me and have no clue as to what research or personal experience I might bring to this discussion. Regarding DID, such individuals have demonstrated again and again the ability to reveal different patterns in scars, burn marks, cysts, left- and right- handedness, visual acuity, color blindness, speech pathology (note that even the most accomplished actor cannot really change his voice pattern), apparent diabetes, and epilepsy. These things have been diagnosed by verified by such people as Dr. Francine Howland, (A Yale psychiatrist), Dr. Bennet Braun, and many others.
Beyond the specific issue of DID, many prominent researchers are increasingly challenging the paradigm that consciousness or personality is even rooted in the brain. The brain might be nothing more than a keyboard through which the non-corporeal self operates the computer of the human body. For example, Dr. Stanislov Grof said, in
The Adventure of Self-Discovery:
The new data are of such far-reaching relevance that they could revolutionize our understanding of the human psyche, of psychopathology, and of the therapeutic process. Some of the observations transcend in their significance the framework of psychology and psychiatry and represent a serious challenge to the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm of Western science. They could change drastically our image of human nature, of culture and history, and of reality.
So, to restate my belief, I infer that personality is greater than matter in the sense that, once all physical phenomenon are stripped away, I think there is still significant evidence that something non-local and non-physical is there. I think most of the people on this thread understood my meaning.
Yet you act as if the very fact that I am religious makes me stupid. That means I gethered all of my thoghts from
The Learning Channel? Would you show such apparent disdain for the following people? Are these theoretical physicists all so stupid?
1) Famous mathematician and physicist Sir James Jeans, whose formulas led to our modern theories of galaxy formation, says:
The universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter; we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter. . . . We discover that the universe shows evidence of a designing or controlling power that has something in common with our own individual minds. . .
Astronomer Robert Jastrow, a self-confessed agnostic, says:
For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.
Arno Penzias, co-winner of the Nobel Prize for physics for his discovery of the microwave background radiation:
We ought to make sure that, since scientists can only speak in physical terms, that they don't take that as being the entire world. . . . I think scientists are very poor witnesses, because they are looking at such a small part of the world. That's my view. And they then tend to think of the physical part of the world which they are able to experience as all of reality.
Sir Arthur Eddington, after his own investigations into the new field of quantum physics, found evidence of a "univeral Mind or Logos" that it tempted him to promote a scientifically-based faith instead of a pure faith. In the context of these musings he wrote:
It will perhaps be said that the conclusion to be drawn from these arguments from modern science is that religion first became possible for a reasonable, scientific man about the year 1927.
I could give many more examples, but it sounds like your mind is, for now, completely made up. I guess Eddington, Penzias, Jastrow, and Jeans are just weak-minded fools?
Your presupposition is found in the power of your own reason and your ability to respond to your own senses. Others who have dedicated their lives to such presuppositions, and demonstrated a high level of skill, independent thinking, and intelligence (in the fields of both psychiatry and physics) have often discovered that such presuppositions still bring one to a Universal Mind that is "outside" or "bigger than" the "painting" of this space-time continuum. No amount of reasoning, seeing, tasting, touching, feeling, or smelling the painting will prove the existence of the Painter, especially since you and I are a part of the painting and confined to it.
You can choose to presuppose a Painter or you can choose not to. Neither choice, in and of itself, makes the chooser foolish.
If so, then I am obviously a weak-minded fool, and not ashamed to admit it. But I will trust the Universal Mind/Logos. Consider my signature:
2 Corinthians 5:13: "If we are out of our mind, it is for God; but if we are in our right mind, it is for you. BTW, I know I am weird.
As to the others who suggested that my thoughts violated the conservation of energy, what if there is an implicate order beyond all visible, explicit, orders? What if what "space" depends upon is not a vacuum, but a plenum? What if there is a a sea of energy from which this apparent matter/energy dualism flows? The physicist David Bohm used the following analogy: a crystal cooled to absolute zero will allow a stream of electrons to pass through it without scattering them. If the temperature is raised, various flaws in the crystal will lose their supposed transparency, and begin to scatter electrons. Bohm theorizes that, from the elctron's point of view, such "flaws" would appear as pieces of matter floating in a sea of nothingness, but this is not really the case. The nothingness and the pieces of matter do not exist independently of each other. They are both part of the deeper reality of the crystal.
What we view as the matter/energy continuum is not limited to this "vacuum" we call the Universe. The universe is not separate from this sea of energy, absolutely bound by the conservation of its own parameters. Bohm suggest that this universe is a ripple on the surface, a comparatively small thing in the midst of an unimaginably vast ocean. In other words, despite its apparent size and material nature, the universe does not exist in and of itself but is the stepchild of something far vaster and more ineffable. Michael Talbot summarizes these thoughts in his book, "The Holographic Universe." Like fish being unaware of the water in which we swim, we see the particulars and say "every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Energy is always conserved." But even that premise is being challenged. There is some new hot-shot physicist (I forget his name) who is gaining some support for a model of the universe that takes Einstein's theory further, says "C" isn't as constant as we once thought, and says that energy does come in from "outside." A summary of his views was in a recent Discover magazine.
Does this ineffable sea of energy exist? And if it does, is it mindful or mindless?
To me, the more logical inference is that Mind produced matter rather than mindless matter somehow produced mind. Because I "see" the mind/logos of the painter in many aspects of creation, I find it quite credible that such a "Mind" would resonate in our own minds. Or one could use different terminology and say that we are "in his image." I also find it quite credible that such a Mind would manifest himself in one particular human: Jesus of Nazareth. What is revealed in the universal I have no problem seeing as manifested in the particular. You obviously don't agree. Yet, even in physics, that which is an unending wave can also manifest as a particular particle. That which is nonlocal can manifest in a particular location at a particular time. Even in observed physics, we don't understand this purely physical phenomenon.
Regarding the gap between Jesus (died circa 33 AD) and the Apostolic teaching (earliest letters, circa 50 AD), I think that gap is exceedingly small by the standards of historical criticism. This is a historical matter; it is not mathematical or repeatable. Therefore, I cannot "prove" it in the sense that some people may demand. But it is an amazing preponderence of evidence by the standards of historical criticism. And I believe I have to render a verdict by looking at that evidence.
I believe the apostolic message is uncorrupted in its most basic form. I believe those Apostles and early disciples were in many cases eyewitnesses. 1 Corinthians 15 challenges those who were alive to interview the witnesses for themselves and come to their own conclusions. It is impossible to say absolutely that no exagerration occurred. But I think the more rational conclusion is to say that the Apostles said exactly what they believed. As they aged and began to die off, they wrote it down for future generations. And there is no evidence that what they wrote has been altered.
As far as "gnostic insights," there are some. Bohm's concept of what we call matter/energy floating in a sea of ineffable energy that is non-material is very gnostic-like. Bohm phrased it in scientific and empirical terms; the Gnostics phrased it in philossophical and intuitive ones. But the Gnostics denied the Incarnation of the Logos in Jesus of Nazareth. The Apostolic Faith, seeming to have derived from eyewitnesses, of course rejected that belief. Hence they parted ways.
IF you are interested, none of this was "spoon-fed" to me, Nor is anything that I referenced from psychology or physics coming even remotely from Christian (or theistic)sources. As far as I know, not one of the quotes is froma believer in God. I think they are agnostics. But not spoon-fed ones who ridicule anyone who believes.