Skip to main content

What if....?

What if a person claiming to get messages from God was examined and found to have brain activity quite like that of persons who are diagnosed as mentally ill... what if all of this is true, yet it is also the case that the purportedly prophetic messages repeatedly proved true?

Comments

Unknown said…
Some commentaries suggest the writings of Ezekiel show evidence of abnormal behaviour in line with paranoia, schizophrenia, and anti-social disorder. Interesting to think about.
6:43 PM
Leo White said…
Yes, it is! I simply don't know what to say about that.
I guess my point in posting that is that being able to measure correlations between what people say and their brain activity is not necessarily the same as knowing the cause of what people say. A scientist who observed what I described would be left scratching his or her head and might eventually acknowledge that something more is going on than can be measured with tools made by human hands.
6:46 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

what is an organism?

How about defining it as an instance of functional complexity? And treating the list of properties as following necessarily from this definition? Okay, this is very diamond-in-the-rough (or perhaps zirconium...) but here goes my thoughts on the matter: (Complexity) Many diverse parts (functional) acting for the sake of the whole I think I need to add something like "not as the instrument of another" or something like that. Given that they act together as one whole and given entropy, etc., the organism will need to posses more order than its surroundings (homeostasis). It will therefore need to take in energy (nutrition), which it will use to sustain its readiness to interact with its environment so as to preserve its own being (homeostasis again?), but which will eventually break down (death), so that in order for that life form to continue it will need to duplicate itself (reproduction), which, upon occurring, will involve both development (growth) to maturity and...
13 comments
Read more

response to friend who suggested that the self is a democracy of neural parts

This is a nice way to try to avoid being cornered re the irreality of the self if you're a reductionist, for you can assert that a pattern obtains at the microscopic level that is not all that unlike the pattern found at the societal level.  No need for the one self that does it all: instead, you have many sub-selfs that compete for dominance or take turns guiding the whole. The problem with this is, however, that the voters/officials are all zombies.  None of them thinks about the whole as such.  And perhaps none of them thinks even about themselves (unless one is a panzoist).  None of them makes a comparison of alternatives. The more this proposed democracy seems like a zombocracy, the more consciousness will be seem to be epiphenomenal. Furthermore, if the oneness of the self is less real than the multiplicity of explanatory neural parts, then why can't each of these neural parts be conceived of as democracy as well?  And why not parts of these parts, et...
6 comments
Read more