Is this film religious propaganda? I thought it would be about soul music but then he died and came to the after life. For time reasons I had to stop watching but I'm curious to know what the film is about. I may continou another day.
shareReligion and spirituality can be mutually exclusive.
shareTrue, but neither has anything to do with reality!
shareYou sure about that? Maybe spirituality has everything to do with reality. Or maybe your reality is different from the reality of others. There's a whole heck of a lot of spiritual people out there. Maybe they understand something that you do not. Hey, it's okay. Nobody can know everything. Or maybe anything, for that matter. We all do our best to make sense of the existential questions. The only conclusion I've drawn is that being sure is a shaky thing to be.
shareNo. Spirituality is by definition something that cannot be physically observer and is therefore exclusive from reality. Saying theres a lot of spiritual people out there is same as saying theres a lot of people drinking alcohol and eating fast food. There being a lot of something does not make it a good decision automatically.
share"Spirituality is by definition something that cannot be physically observed and is therefore exclusive from reality."
Is love exclusive from reality?
(And just to be clear, I was never appealing to the idea that a lot of people makes something more or less good. But rather that "reality" is viewed through many different lenses.)
Yes. Love is a chemical reaction of your body that releases a mix of hormones in your brain which encourage happyness and attachment to the person you love. It is observable and measurable. It even has a timer. It works for the first 6 months and then you have to replace it with actual relationship because the hormone induced attachment starts waning off. This is why most couples separate in the first year.
shareYou've done an admirable job here of explaining how love is accessed and how the chemicals that help access it can even be observed and measured. Unfortunately, I'm not seeing a lot here about love itself.
shareThe chemical reactions is love. Unfortunately for a very long time we did not understood those biological reactions and therefore we had to use a generic name for it.
shareWell, of course one can believe that. One can believe that love is nothing more than a chemical process in the brain, separate and apart from anybody else’s reality. Or one can believe that it’s something bigger than oneself. something inherent in the universe, something we tap into, in which case the chemicals merely get us there. Fact is, philosophers have debated this ever since Plato’s “forms.” The latter seems much more likely to be true to me than the former. But I can understand how others might feel differently. There's no definitive agreement on the matter, however. And science can't help because an experience, the experience of love in our example, is something that, as you say, cannot be "physically observed," any more than a memory can be physically observed. And therefore it's outside of science's purview. But to get back to the original point, that doesn't mean an experience (or a memory) is not a part of reality. Science can point to evidence of the experience (chemicals responding in the brain) but science cannot examine the experience in and of itself. And yet we can all agree that experiencing something is a very "real" thing. It is, in fact, what constitutes reality.
shareWell, one can believe that pigs have wings and fly when you turn your back to them but that does not make it a belief based on reality.
"Or one can believe that it’s something bigger than oneself. something inherent in the universe, something we tap into"
Trite nonsense coming from psychological insecurity and lack of trust in yourself and humanity.
A memory can be observed. We have pathed the neural links firing when a memory is recalled and are beginning to understand how that memory is stored in a brain. Memory is physical too, you know.
A memory is part of reality because it is something that we can observe in reality. Not because your lack of knowledge in the process that is required to make memory available to you makes you think it comes from something outside of reality.
The chemicals in the brain IS the experience.
Well, I happen to be a master at trite nonsense and my insecurities and lack of trust are legendary! Nevertheless, let's try to stick to the subject at hand, please.
I don't honestly think you are understanding what I am saying, Strazdas. I'm talking about the experience, not the evidence of it. I understand full well "the process." But the two are not the same. They're just not. You can't show me a memory of yours by pointing me to some brain matter of yours and saying, "Hey, Richard, get a load of this memory of mine from last Christmas." An experience, or a memory, is a subjective thing that is apprehended by an "I" using the brain and its chemical processes to apprehend it. Your problem, so far as I can tell, is that you are conflating the "I" with the chemical processes that, collectively, create it, as if we are robots. But we're not robots. The "I" is greater than the sum of its parts. Now, believing we are robots (albeit sophisticated ones) is fine as far as it goes and you are free to believe it (as free as a robot can be), but you must acknowledge that, no matter how much we understand the "pathed neural links," the true nature of the "I" has not been proven one way or the other. And your way of belief strikes me as just really straining against reason. (As I'm sure my way of belief strikes you.)
And that's just the way it is.
By the way, Strazdas, what we're talking about here, of course, is consciousness. But more precisely, we're talking about what's known in scientific/philosophical circles as "The hard problem of consciousness." There's no consensus on the concept of the “I” because we do not understand the why and how of consciousness. We understand the so-called easy problems, e.g. how we are able to apprehend and integrate information, solve problems, focus attention, etc., because we understand the brain mechanics that make all this possible. But there is widespread disagreement between even neuroscientists as to the harder problem, the problem of consciousness, the problem, that is to say, of subjective, conscious experience.
Wiki has a nice little summation on this in case you're interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness#Relationship_to_scientific_frameworks.
"You can't show me a memory of yours by pointing me to some brain matter of yours and saying, "Hey, Richard, get a load of this memory of mine from last Christmas.""
Well not yet. Soon though considering how neurolinking is developing.
"Your problem, so far as I can tell, is that you are conflating the "I" with the chemical processes that, collectively, create it, as if we are robots."
Thats because there is no "I", just the chemicals. And yes, robots made of meat are still robots.
"But we're not robots."
Yes we are.
"Yes we are."
Since we're on a movie board, my friend, I'll simply close this conversation with a classic movie line: "That's just, like, your opinion, man."
And it is nothing more than this. I've known people like you my whole life. Your mind is made up and you will never concede that another viewpoint is possible. And yet you accuse me of being the psychologically insecure one. Interesting.
You have not solved the hard problem of consciousness. If you have, I do wish you'd publish your findings in a peer-reviewed journal somewhere. Please let me know if you do so.
Until then, enjoy your robotic worldview.
Another viewpoint is definitely possible. That does not mean that that viewpoint will be correct. (Got to love English, three "That"s in a single sentence).
Hard problem of conciuosness is like hard problem of god. You cannot solve something when you start with the wrong premise. If you start off a point that conciuosness is something more than just the sum of the physics processes in our bodies then you obviuosly cannot solve the problem when there is nothing more than the physics processes in our bodies.
"Wrong premise"? What does that even mean? Wrong by what standards?
Here, let's see what happens when we rearrange your statement like so: "If you start off with the point that consciousness is nothing more than the physics processes in our bodies, then you obviously cannot solve the problem when consciousness is something more than just the sum of the physics processes in our bodies."
Hmm...that works too. So who gets to choose the premise? You?
I agree, RichardBlaine is begging the question! First it must be proven that consciousness exists and then we can get down to the fuzzies of discerning whether or not something has the property of consciousness.
Here, I define a consciousness as the ability to make a choice independent of the environment. Or rather, to instruct the atoms in your body to move in particular ways thus leading to a different outcome than what would have happened normally as time passed... also known as free will is an illusion and does not exist or the philosophy of determinism.
An argument from ignorance would state that since we cannot prove that free will exists, or is even possible in our deterministic universe this is evidence free will likely doesn't exist. But look at the types of things we argue don't have free will, Dennett's true believers rests on the claim that because our language evolved to say "he loves her" rather than "the sight of her brings about a dopamine rush in his brain" is conclusive evidence that "he" is a rational agent, an agent with free will.
Free will is an interesting concept. The best option we have is to know that determinism is true but do not tell others that it is true for they will turn to nihilism. Nihilism on societal level.... doesnt end well.
that being said, i dont even have free will not to write this comment. Ha.
you want reality from an ANIMATED DISNEY MOVIE? That's a special kind of stupid.
shareWell, being a stone-cold atheist who never uses words like "spiritual" (and whatever arbitrary way someone decides to define that), I would say no. No, it's not. No more so than Ghost, Casper, Beetlejuice, Field of Dreams, The Sixth Sense, or the plethora of other movies having to do with spirits. It's just a fantasy story.
That being said, I'm just realizing your comment is 3 months old. So this response is probably irrelevant. lol
I would agree that it's a Fantasy story, about the universal dream of fixing your life and being able to undo all the random bad shit that happens.
As such, it bears a certain resemblance to the fantasies spun by many organized religions, but is strictly non-denominational and I didn't notice any references to a God, Gods, or a Creator. Now I admit I wasn't paying attention, but it seemed about as useful to organized religion as the Gods of Olympus in the Disney "Hercules".
Funny thing to note: When Jerry is first encountered the movie actually asks of this is heaven and the answer is that this is a thepretical phyiscs construct thats too hard to comprehend by humand and is therefore represented in understnadable form. So from a "hardline atheist" perspective this movie is actually on the atheists side.
shareI thought it was about shoes.
share"I may continou another day."
I'd say you're much to sensitive to expose yourself to this Riefenstahlian-like agitprop.