Why Do the Religious Reject Science While Embracing the Impossible?

[Veritas Aequitas]

Since the Scientific FS is the most credible and objective as the gold standard, whatever you claim as Metaphysics has to be ranked with the gold standard.

I've been off the gold standard for a very long time. You're free to accept it as it stands and as you wish; besides which, standards have a way of changing, just like language, meaning and perspectives change. Standards, in effect, have a limited life always subject to revision.

Judging by any standard has a tendency to become less philosophic and more programmatic.

I agree, at present the scientific FS is the gold standard of credibility and objectivity.
I cannot sense there is a possibility for the gold standard to change in the future.
The only possibility is when humans become omniscient-gods which is impossible.

Do you have a verifying and justifying system of reality and objectivity other than the scientific FS?
If any, what could make it a possibility?

[FlashDangerpants]

My concern is to expedite the above improvement in quantum jumps, thus my introduction of the FS approach to reality and knowledge.

You will never sell your FSK theory to a real life human being. It is backwards. It doesn't collect knowledge the way an actual field of study dies, but formalises the manufacture of "facts" out of hallucinations. As soon as anybody even picks up a hint of that, they know you are mad.

[Belinda]

So tell me, Alexiev, does justice arrive via psychic transmission, or does it knock politely before stepping through the door of your frontal lobe?


Right you are Mike! You do do poetic language to a philosophical purpose, AND you show how poetic language can mediate truth.

[Age]

Mike, referencing electro-chemical reactions is not an explanation or answer.

If you want me to accept ideas as material, then you must explain how, for example, justice (as a concept, an ideal, an idea) is material.

You can't just say electrical impulses firing in my brain, the neurotransmitters transmitting signals, the networks of neurons forming connections or the electrochemical processes that shape perception, memory, and cognition and leave it there, as though all that explains anything.

You see this, yes?

Henry, justice is a concept that your brainmind creates. There is no need to deny the existence of the brain and there is no need to deny the existence of the mind. Brain and mind are the same thing .

Are they?

When was this UNCOVERED and FOUND OUT BY 'humanity', EXACTLY?

Your brain is what a neurosurgeon can see and feel: your mind is what you and you alone can feel.

WHAT?

Talk about just CONTRADICTORY "yourself" in two sentences and CLAIMS.

you SAY and CLAIM that, 'brain' AND 'mind' are the SAME thing. HOWEVER, you ALSO SAY and CLAIM that ONLY the 'brain' can be seen and felt when the skull is cut open.

These are not separate but are the same thing (called Henry's 'brainmind') from different points of view.

Talk ABOUT ANOTHER PRIME example of WHY these human beings, here, took SO, SO LONG TO ALSO UNCOVER and SEE what the ACTUAL Truth of things IS, here, EXACTLY.

[Alexiev]

[



You don’t get to just wave your hands and declare science irrelevant when it inconveniences your argument. Determinism—real determinism, the one supported by science, not the watered-down mystical nonsense you're clinging to—says that nothing happens without a cause. Every thought, every concept, every so-called metaphysical musing, is a consequence of prior physical interactions. You don’t get to carve out an exception for your pet ideas just because you find the implications uncomfortable.

Science isn’t here to coddle your philosophical preferences. It doesn’t exist to stroke your ego about justice or any other abstract concept. Science connects the dots, it tracks causality, it establishes patterns. It doesn’t claim to tell us how things "really" work in some ultimate sense—it maps reality as we can observe and test it. And that’s all that matters.

Now, when someone—like you—introduces explanations that flatly contradict those well-established dots and connections, science dismisses them. Not because it’s close-minded, not because it "ignores" philosophy, but because the burden of proof is on the person claiming something beyond what has already been demonstrated to be true. If your mystical, pseudo-metaphysical nonsense wants to be taken seriously, it has one job: show that the existing, repeatedly verified, rigorously tested scientific connections are false. That’s it. That’s the standard.

But you don’t even try. You just whine about how physics doesn’t help you “understand justice.” As if that’s some deep revelation. Physics isn’t here to spoon-feed you your moral intuitions. That’s your problem to work out. What physics does do is establish the framework within which all things—including justice, including morality, including your own ability to think and speak—must operate. And if your understanding of justice rests on introducing supernatural, immaterial explanations that contradict that framework, then your understanding of justice is wrong.

You can call that “idiotic and irrelevant” all you want. It doesn’t change the reality that your argument is intellectually bankrupt. So maybe it’s you who should cut it out—cut out the hand-waving, the evasions, the desperate attempt to keep your favorite ideas floating safely above the realm of scientific scrutiny. They’re not above scrutiny. They’re delusions if they don’t align with what is demonstrably true. And science doesn’t give a damn about your feelings on the matter.

Why do you keep repeating yourself ad nauseum? It's annoying and irrelevant. Since you appear to have no idea what my argument oomprises, your comments continue to be idiotic and irrelevant.

I've explained my position many times. Repeating it again would be casting pearls before swine, so I won't bother.

[phyllo]

But you don’t even try. You just whine about how physics doesn’t help you “understand justice.” As if that’s some deep revelation. Physics isn’t here to spoon-feed you your moral intuitions. That’s your problem to work out. What physics does do is establish the framework within which all things—including justice, including morality, including your own ability to think and speak—must operate.

There is no finding in physics which tells us what justice is.

Physics may be the foundation of everything but it can't be used in every situation, to solve every problem. The reason is very simple ... justice and morality are highly abstracted ideas and we don't understand how the low level of physics applies to these ideas. How do the "conservation laws" apply? It's a silly question.

So what can be done? We can use psychology and sociology.

[Alexis Jacobi]

The HYPERBOREAN APOLLO is BACK!

1) Let’s get real, people: the underlying issue here, the actual base of this conversation, what underpins it, actually has to do with ‘the recovery of one’s own soul’ and the deep-seated need (in everyone who writes here) to overcome a general malaise that begins to evolve into something like a psychotic rupture (I speak of ‘the world around us’). The desire to dominate on philosophical levels is, I think, a manifestation of this ‘unrealized need’ to progress on this other level.

Our situation, and our ideation, in one way or another is attempting to confront this.

2) Mike brings here an absolute, solidified, intractable, domineering, psychological position tarted-up as a science-perspective. It is actually a chilling metaphysical position. In this, we see a project of deception which I do not think Mike is aware of. I say “deception” insofar as his shtick has the objective of binding perception and understanding down into an ultra-materialism. But its real function is, for want of a better term, the suppression of the spiritual. I must point out that even in the world of intellectual physics there is a school of trained physicists that oppose the limitations of this materialist model.

3) There is (indeed) developing a new descriptive model in which man, enclosed within descriptive confines (Mike is an exemplar), attempts to rise up out of it. It is similar to escaping from a physical cage but on other conceptual levels. The idea, or the principle, operating in this reflects (if you will) the pattern of psychic rebirth, but yet remains within, or speaks from out of, that “gold standard” which is a) a methodology and b) a language model.

I will be taking questions later.

[Please understand that a minor charge of US$29.99 will be automatically deducted from your (albeit meagre) bank account with each question posed — to keep the lights on in my Apollonian Mansions.]

[BigMike]

But you don’t even try. You just whine about how physics doesn’t help you “understand justice.” As if that’s some deep revelation. Physics isn’t here to spoon-feed you your moral intuitions. That’s your problem to work out. What physics does do is establish the framework within which all things—including justice, including morality, including your own ability to think and speak—must operate.

There is no finding in physics which tells us what justice is.

Physics may be the foundation of everything but it can't be used in every situation, to solve every problem. The reason is very simple ... justice and morality are highly abstracted ideas and we don't understand how the low level of physics applies to these ideas. How do the "conservation laws" apply? It's a silly question.

So what can be done? We can use psychology and sociology.

Oh, Phyllo, it’s not that we “don’t understand how the low level of physics applies to” justice—it’s that physics, particularly the conservation laws, dismantles the very idea that justice is some free-floating, self-generated principle independent of causality. You seem to think the problem is physics being too “low-level” to touch abstract concepts like justice, when in reality, physics eliminates the need for the fictions people attach to those concepts.

Justice doesn’t arise from some immaterial notion of "free will" or an intrinsic "sense of right and wrong" that exists outside of the physical world. It emerges as a function of deterministic processes—biology, neurology, social structures, evolutionary pressures. And what does physics tell us? That nothing happens without a cause. That every action is the inevitable result of prior conditions. That what people call "justice" is just a set of behavioral and institutional patterns shaped by those conditions, not some independent metaphysical force guiding moral decisions.

So no, physics won’t hand you a moral framework on a silver platter. That’s not its job. But it does something far more important: it removes the illusions that have warped our understanding of justice for centuries. It tells us, unequivocally, that justice doesn’t stem from free will, divine law, or personal virtue—it is an emergent property of a causally determined system. And if you don’t grasp how foundational that is, you’re missing the entire point.

[Alexis Jacobi]

If we cannot really see, and understand, the meaning of the time we are in (it impinges on all of us not only in politics but in psychologics), then it seems to me we will not be able to understand ourselves and what, to contextualize it acutely, we are actually doing in this performative conversation.

(I am working on an illuminating pamphlet, written in fine Esperanto, which I will make available here soon).

[Atla]

The HYPERBOREAN APOLLO is BACK!

Wait.. where is Sat-Guru Mahatma? What happened to him? What did you do to him?!

[henry quirk]

When I used justice as an example it was in service to gettin' Mike to explain how ideas are material.

Here's the first post...

If the soul is immaterial, how exactly does it interact with the material brain?

How do AJ's words -- symbols place-holding for immaterial ideas and meanings -- move you, nuthin' but meat, to respond?

Where, in the meat that is Mike, is his understanding, his disagreement, his disappointment, his anger? Where in Mike's meat is his defensiveness, his idealism, his certainty, his pedantry?

Mike, of course, hasn't answered the question. He's foisted up the usual references to electro-chemical reactions and neural patterns and whatnot.

I pointed this out...

Mike, referencing electro-chemical reactions is not an explanation or answer.

If you want me to accept ideas as material, then you must explain how, for example, justice (as a concept, an ideal, an idea) is material.

You can't just say electrical impulses firing in my brain, the neurotransmitters transmitting signals, the networks of neurons forming connections or the electrochemical processes that shape perception, memory, and cognition and leave it there, as though all that explains anything.

You see this, yes?

And there's where justice came in. I could have instead asked him how it is I can picture with perfect clarity an image of the first girl I kissed, or I could have asked him how I can with perfect clarity imagine not one unicorn but five or six or a dozen different versions of a unicorn. My point is: Mike sez ideas are material. I want him to explain that. He hasn't. He'll talk an ear off about neural processing, but he never gets to the answer.

You explain -- poorly -- processing mechanisms, but still refuse to explain how an idea is material.

Justice, you say, is encoded in the brain. Where? in what cluster of cells? And how?

You say justice is a neural pattern (a configuration of electrical and chemical activity). What does that mean? Do electrons, neutrons, and protons line themselves up to form the symbol JUSTICE? If I use a powerful microscope can I see the symbol etched on the side of a dendrite, with lil arrows pointing the way to other related patterns etched on the sides of other dendrites?? Can I distill JUSTICE, the material, out and bottle it or store it in a battery?

You say justice is abstract and represented in neural activity so where is the abstract bein' represented and how is an abstract material?

You say Justice is an emergent property encoded in the brain. Where? How?

[BigMike]

If we cannot really see, and understand, the meaning of the time we are in (it impinges on all of us not only in politics but in psychologics), then it seems to me we will not be able to understand ourselves and what, to contextualize it acutely, we are actually doing in this performative conversation.

(I am working on an illuminating pamphlet, written in fine Esperanto, which I will make available here soon).

Alexis, always reaching for the grand, sweeping pronouncements—"the true meaning of our time." But tell me, whose meaning are we talking about? Yours? Mine? Some universal cosmic force conveniently aligning with your worldview? Because meaning, as you present it, sounds suspiciously like something imposed from above—crafted with intent, designed with purpose. And if that’s what you’re suggesting, then let’s not dance around it: are you smuggling in God's purpose here?

Because if meaning requires a maker, if it is something given rather than something constructed, then you’re flirting with the classic theological assertion that our existence is scripted, that we are players in a divine drama rather than emergent phenomena in a deterministic universe. But if meaning is merely a human construct—something we generate to navigate our own subjective experiences—then why speak of “the true meaning of our time” as if it’s something waiting to be discovered rather than something continuously shaped?

And let’s not forget the irony here: you, the great champion of metaphysics and deeper seeing, throwing around vague profundities while pretending they have more weight than they do. Meaning is whatever we make of it, Alexis. Unless, of course, you’re implying it’s been made for us. In which case, just come out and say it.

[phyllo]

Oh, Phyllo, it’s not that we “don’t understand how the low level of physics applies to” justice—it’s that physics, particularly the conservation laws, dismantles the very idea that justice is some free-floating, self-generated principle independent of causality. You seem to think the problem is physics being too “low-level” to touch abstract concepts like justice, when in reality, physics eliminates the need for the fictions people attach to those concepts.

Justice doesn’t arise from some immaterial notion of "free will" or an intrinsic "sense of right and wrong" that exists outside of the physical world. It emerges as a function of deterministic processes—biology, neurology, social structures, evolutionary pressures. And what does physics tell us? That nothing happens without a cause. That every action is the inevitable result of prior conditions. That what people call "justice" is just a set of behavioral and institutional patterns shaped by those conditions, not some independent metaphysical force guiding moral decisions.

So no, physics won’t hand you a moral framework on a silver platter. That’s not its job. But it does something far more important: it removes the illusions that have warped our understanding of justice for centuries. It tells us, unequivocally, that justice doesn’t stem from free will, divine law, or personal virtue—it is an emergent property of a causally determined system. And if you don’t grasp how foundational that is, you’re missing the entire point.

You seem to be so focused on your ideology that you are apparently unable to address any practical issues that are presented to you.

Okay, everything has a cause ... what is just? what is unjust? what are you basing your answers on? It can't be physics and it can't be causality because those are neutral.

[Gary Childress]

Once upon a time there was cooperation and openness in the world. Then the great swami Alexis Jacobi appeared and gave everyone labels. He called the "sick" "sick" and the "healthy" "healthy". Then he called each people by their own name as a people. And the world fell into suspicion and distrust.

Alexis looked upon the world he created and said, "This is how it ought to be". And those who had believed in cooperation and openness had lost. Perhaps to resurface another day.

And Alexis' Jacobi's deeds were forever recorded by the "sick" bard named Gary Childress, back in the days when this was written.

[promethean75]

Here's an excerpt from a little swing piece me and the boys wrote recently called BigMike for your listening pleasure while browsing the thread.

https://streamable.com/32gouf