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To: PasorBob; Alamo-Girl
Science does have much to say about mind and the world and reality. (Psyche and spirit could be described as part of mind and world and reality). What it says, however, isn't satisfying to mystics, so they reject it out of hand thereby creating a "first reality".

How can such things as "mind," "world," or "reality" be objects for science? How, for instance, can "world" be understood as a concrete object of intention? It's not something you can just lay down on a lab bench and conduct experiments on.

Sure we could say that "Psyche and spirit could be described as part of mind and world and reality." But that would not be a scientific statement. For science deals with direct observables, and neither psyche nor spirit is a direct observable — nor is "mind", "world," or "reality" for that matter. Science cannot be the authority WRT such phenomena, for its method is inapplicable to them.

102 posted on 11/16/2008 1:15:54 PM PST by betty boop
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To: betty boop; PasorBob; hosepipe
Thank you so very much for sharing your insights, dearest sister in Christ!

How can such things as "mind," "world," or "reality" be objects for science?

Indeed.

Correlation is not causation.

The classic example: that a bunch of storks appear around the same time a bunch of babies are born does not establish a causal relationship between the two events.

Image the reaction of a caveman faced with a functioning portable television. He might whack the screen and say "aha, the image was made by this area of the box." And he might whack the speakers and attribute the loss of sound to that part of the box. He might think when he killed the box, he killed the sound and the image. To him, the image and sound were "in" the box.

But that caveman knows nothing of information, signal processing, broadcasting. He is quite wrong. Correlation is not causation.

That's the same way I see science constrained by "methodological naturalism" trying to address "mind" "soul" and "spirit." Ditto for "world" and "reality." The domain of science is intentionally and significantly reduced, it does not have the means to discern beyond naturalism.


117 posted on 11/16/2008 9:50:34 PM PST by Alamo-Girl
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To: betty boop

Did you know that to the Pythagoreans, soul was equivalent to breath?

This makes sense because they were trying to determine the difference between what it meant to be alive or dead. Clearly dead people didn’t breath. More interesting is the story that they believed that bean plants were repositories for the soul. That’s why they forbade eating beans.

Now why would they draw these conclusions?


154 posted on 11/19/2008 11:43:17 AM PST by PasorBob
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